It’s estimated that more than 350 million English language Web searches are conducted every day – yes you read that correctly, EVERYDAY! Web searching is now the second most widely used Internet operation after e-mail. So it’s safe to say that the Search Engine has become the starting point for almost every Web user.

With that being said, how many of those Web users have the time and patience to wade through 2,000 or even three pages of search results? They simply won’t. This is why being ranked within the top ten listings is so critical to business-to-business companies.

So what is Search Engine Optimization(SEO)? It’s the process of improving a Web site’s position in the natural search results such as those produced by Google. No, it’s not black magic or Voodoo. It’s a real process of researching keywords, competitors’ Web sites, and then analyzing your own Web site. From there, a SEO professional can start making adjustments to boost your site rank higher.

In this three part Blog series, I will go over the history of search, the optimization steps, and how to choose the right Search partner.

So let’s get started.

A Brief History of the Internet Search

In 1993, Massachusetts Institute of Technology student Matthew Gray created World Wide Web Wanderer, the first automated Web crawler. It didn’t do much more than collect URLs, but Pandora’s box had been opened.

By 1995, several metacrawler sites had appeared, including Infoseek, Excite and AltaVista. These search engines worked to a certain degree, but the results weren’t always relevant to the user’s initial search.

Enter Yahoo, which was a human edited database. Yahoo was effective for some time, but as the Web grew, its small database of sites couldn’t keep up. If your site wasn’t Yahoo’s database, all you could do was continue submitting your URL and hope for the best.

To rectify this issue, Yahoo adopted a search technology called Google to provide secondary results. Suddenly, the world of Web searching started to change for the good.

In 1998, Google officially launched its own Web site, and it took the search world by storm. Its rise in popularity can be attributed to its proprietary search algorithm, which produces highly relevant search results. Although other search sites such as Yahoo and MSN have done a fairly decent job of keeping up with Google’s technology, Google still commences about 60 percent of all global searches.

It’s easy to see why the search engine is here to stay. In part two of this series we will go over the optimization steps of a Web site…so stay tuned.

But for now, enjoy this clip below.

Related posts:

1. Google on the ropes? I don’t think so…
2. Search marketing up 31% in 2007
3. Bing – the answer to the question no one was asking?
4. You are what you search
5. What’s Your Web site Costing You?

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About the author:

Christopher Raymond is the Director of Interactive at Schubert. He oversees design, programming, technical management and strategy for Schubert Interactive clients. When not knee deep in code, Chris can be found cannon balling himself down a rocky trail on his mountain bike, or on the highway at full throttle in his Mustang Cobra.

Follow Christopher on Twitter: @Chris_Raymond