Long ago, in a distant time, I designed a very nice website for a beautiful inn located in the Redwoods of Humboldt County. I was real happy with the website, as were the owners, but nobody else seemed to be enjoying it. The stats counter bespoke the ugly truth that we were getting very little traffic.
Of course, I submitted it to all the search engines and directories, but we didn't seem to be showing up very high in the search results.
Back then, Altavista was the undisputed king of the search world, but there were other search engines as well, and several web directories which could, potentially, send us lots of traffic. I submitted to them all.
Meta tags were big back then. I tinkered around with the tags, stuffed my text with keywords, even played around with some invisible text. (I was black hat before black hat was a descriptor).
One day, I came into the hotel office and found the owner to be very excited. We were on the first page of Altavista for our search term. I was given a hearty pat on the back, called a genius, and bought a steak dinner for my efforts.
I was hooked.
After that, I hung out a lot at the Virtual Promote forums. The term SEO was just beginning to evolve. Many of the guys on that forum were promoting adult websites, since that's where the money was at the time, and the competition was fierce. I learned a lot. SEO became an acronym which could be applied to either search engine optimization or to the professional promoter, the search engine optimizer.
Disney had a web directory, at the time, which they had at a domain called Go.com. This was a unique directory which, like the still evolving DMOZ project, was volunteer edited. I volunteered for several categories and was able to send some phenomenal traffic to our clients. One day, for no apparent reason, they closed their doors. The traffic stopped.
About the time this happened, Google came crashing onto the scene. With their fancy algorithms they set the SEO industry on it's head. There was an ugly stretch there for a while where the webmasters went to war with the search engine, trying every trick imaginable to game the search engine. Soldiers went against the monster with keyword stuffing, cloaked websites, everything imaginable. One by one they limped back to camp brutally beaten by Google - and usually BANNED! This was a different kind of critter.
Slowly, the SEO community began to realize that Google could not be easily gamed like the other search engines.
I remember one day on the forums when word leaked out from a Google source that Google was using the number of links to your site to determine relevance. Once again we went to war, setting up link farms, etc. Once again, banned.
We're at a funny place, today. SEO is still important, maybe more so than ever, but there are a lot of subleties. Google is kind of like the great looking girl at a party. She can definitely be seduced, but sublety and smoothness are called for. The direct blunt approach just won't work.
This blog is dedicated to chronicling the subleties used today in the SEO world.
Enjoy!
