In just the last few years, SEO (search engine optimization) has become an art, leaving behind the simple meta tag and keyword stuffing tactics of recent yesteryear and transforming into a highly controlled science. SEO is a crucial component of every company's marketing plan today since it provides free, and more importantly, targeted website traffic. The evolution of building authority, understanding complex algorithms, and secretive "black hat" techniques show not only where SEO has been, but also where it is headed in the future.

This article provides a short overview of the recent evolution of SEO. It details the beginnings of SEO, describes its growth spurts, and ends with the current state of SEO and the SEO firm, leaving you with an appreciation of what lies ahead.

The Start Of Search Engine Optimization

At the end of the 1990's, optimizing a website simply meant placing main keywords with a page's meta tags. This approach worked well for a while, but webmasters quickly discovered that placing keywords hundreds or thousands of times on the page (in an invisible text color) boosted the rankings of their website in the search engines. Manipulation and abuse were rampant. In response, the search engines developed an algorithm that prevented this abuse.

More Links Are Better

The search engines set out to remove any factors influencing a website's ranking from the control of the webmaster. The solution was links. In the beginning of algorithms, the websites with the most number of incoming links were thought to be the most popular by the search engines, making them deserving of a first page ranking. The efforts to take ranking control away from webmasters was quite successful at first, but not for long since webmasters adapted and found new ways to show popularity by building indiscriminate incoming links. Creating a new, stronger algorithm was the only way to stop the search engines from becoming crippled.

The Development Of Link Building

The number of incoming links was no longer good enough to achieve a high ranking. In response, webmasters built large networks of websites (mostly in totally unrelated subjects), and linked them to a main website. This created their own popularity by manipulating their search engine rankings with bogus links. A highly developed algorithm took care of this problem by calculating the popularity of the websites originating the links. The idea that webmasters could stimulate popularity for a main website with a large network of useless websites no longer worked.

The Introduction Of Authority

SEO made a large jump forward with the introduction of authority, a new algorithm that dismissed the old way of measuring a website's popularity by incoming links by creating a system measuring the authority of a website. Based on a website's standing within an online neighborhood, websites with incoming links from authoritative websites achieved a high search engine ranking thanks to a boost in authority. This was a dramatic change in the evolution of SEO.

The Modern SEO Firm

Through the years, the SEO firm has reinvented itself numerous times. Many firms have refused to change and continue to use ineffective, irrelevant tactics currently rejected by the major search engines, Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. An SEO firm refusing to modify their techniques to suit the ever-changing search engines will die a slow death, taking their unknowing clients with them. Today's modern SEO firm is focused on creating a complete SEO plan catering to the major search engines and a satisfactory user experience. The industry has changed dramatically in the last few years and the evolution will continue.