Search engine optimization (SEO) is such a broad term. It can be quite overwhelming if you try to take the whole of it in a single bite. There are so many facets of search engine optimization, from how search engines work (and they all work a little differently) to how a web page is designed. What do you do when you need to find some bit of information — a fact, a statistic, a description, a product, or even just a phone number? In most cases, you bring up one of the major search engines and type in the term or phrase that you’re looking for and then click through the results, right? Then, like magic, the information you were looking for is right at your fingertips, accessible in a fraction of the time it used to take. But of course search engines weren’t
always around.
In its infancy, the Internet wasn’t what you think of when you use it now. In fact, it was nothing like the web of interconnected sites that has become one of the greatest business facilitators of our time. Instead, what was called the Internet was actually a collection of FTP (File Transfer Protocol) sites that users could access to download (or upload) files. To find a specific file in that collection, users had to navigate through each file. Sure, there were shortcuts. If you knew the right people — that would be the people who knew the exact address of the file you were looking for — you could go straight to the file. That’s assuming you knew exactly what you were looking for.

The whole process made finding files on the Internet a difficult, time-consuming exercise in patience; but that was before a student at McGill University in Montreal decided there had to be an easier way. In 1990, Alan Emtage created the first search tool used on the Internet. His creation, an index of files on the Internet, was called Archie.
Archie wasn’t actually a search engine like those that you use today, but at the time it was a program many Internet users were happy to have. The program basically downloaded directory
listings for all the files that were stored on anonymous FTP sites in a given network of computers. Those listings were then plugged in to a searchable database of web sites. Archie’s search capabilities weren’t as fancy as the natural language capabilities you find in most common search engines today, but at the time it got the job done. Archie indexed computer files, making them easier to locate.
In 1991, however, another student named Mark McCahill, at the University of Minnesota, realized that if you could search for files on the Internet, then surely you could also search plain
text for specific references in the files. Because no such application existed, he created Gopher, a program that a program that indexed the plain-text documents that later became the first web sites on the public Internet.
Both of these programs worked in essentially the same way, enabling users to search the indexed information by keyword. From there, search as you know it began to mature. The first real
search engine, in the form that we know search engines today, didn’t come into being until 1993. Developed by Matthew Gray, it was called Wandex. Wandex was the first program to both index and search the index of pages on the Web. This technology was the first program to crawl the Web, and later became the basis for all search crawlers. After that, search engines took on a life of their own. From 1993 to 1998, the major search engines that you’re probably familiar with today were created:

• Excite—1993
• Yahoo!—1994
• Web Crawler —1994
• Lycos —1994
• Infoseek— 1995
• AltaVista — 1995
• Inktomi—1996
• Ask Jeeves — 1997
• Google —1997
• MSN Search—1998
• Bing – 2009

To be continued here…