Back when the internet had just started becoming popular SEO was a function that only a few so called gurus knew how to do. It was mostly trial and error processes that sometimes worked, yet often did not provide the traffic increases we hoped for. Quite a bit of what was done was simply making changes that seemed to be right, and then watching the listings go up or down to know if it was working or not. Nothing was just plain known back then and everything had to be figured out. You needed to really apply yourself and your time to figure out what made the algorithm happy, and what didn’t. Today things are quite different. Now there are a set of known techniques, things that really need to be done, that will get your site to be search engine friendly. It’s all code updates, content changes and inbound linking today.
Way back when I started to SEO the term hadn’t even been coined yet. I found that if I added the keyword I wanted to get listed for one more time than the current #1 site I would take over that position. Google wasn’t even around, I imagine the Google gurus were in high school still. Times were exciting and the internet was the new frontier … just waiting to be conquered. Search engines were using the meta tag information to rank sites. So if you had your keyword in your meta keywords tag you would rank for it. Well, actually if your competition used it twice they would rank, so you would want to use it three times. It was really that simple at first. Nothing was impossible, so it seemed, and making money online because a simple task of setting up a site and doing this optimization thing to it.
Eventually the engines had to find new ways to rank a site. Meta tags were not the answer as everyone abused them and kept adding keywords so they’d rank #1. Title tags began to be seen as important and became something that to this day needs to be utilized on every website. Algorithms started to become more sophisticated. Things began to change in the search results as engines began to provide more relevant results to their users. These were really exciting time. Nothing like it has ever happened. It was cutting edge.
When it was realized the optimization of a site was required if you wanted to be a successful business the whole idea of SEO, or optimization, was just starting to take shape. Frankly, I had no idea what to do to approach these new requirements that the engines had, and of course, they didn’t let you know what they thought was important! Slowly, by trial and error and gains and losses, we all began to figure out which things we could do that would help a site. A lot of common sense went into all this research and trial and error. We also discovered things that we definitely did not want to do.
Times have changed and come full circle. It is no longer necessary to hire on high priced SEO consultants and gurus to get your site optimized. See, along the way over the past years everything that has to do with optimizing a website has come out into the open. Today you can learn how to optimize your own website, and do it well, all on your own. How you learn is up to you. You can frequent all of the blogs and forums and absorb everything that is being tossed about. You can also take a structured course in how to optimize your own site. Either way, today learning how to optimize a website is a simple matter of training yourself in SEO … and it is very possible for anyone to do themselves.
There are quite a few ways for you to learn SEO today through online tutorials and courses. Be sure to choose a SEO tutorial that will show you the coding changes to make as well as provide information about inbound linking and how to begin generating these valuable backlinks to your site. Today, it’s all a matter of learning what SEO is and then getting the job done … it’s no longer a specialty field that you need to hire a technical guru for. SEO has settled down and become a standard part of web development.
Robert (BK) Kelsey runs Ethical SEO Service and offers Ethical SEO Training as an affordable introduction to SEO (enough to optimize any website), as well as an Advanced SEO Training Course.