Webmasters and the people who were writing content for websites began to learn how to optimize the websites for search engines back in the early 1990’s when the first search engines were just being born. At first, all a website owner had to do was submit his URL to the search engine. The search engines would then release what is called a spider to crawl the website and then the spider would return to the search engine with links it had taken from the URL that was entered.

By 1997 the terms Black Hat and White Hat were in use on the web. It had become more noticeable to the website owners that when their websites or pages were placed early in the search results they got more viewer attention and page views. This is the real beginning of using SEO, black and white for results in ranking.

Early search algorithms were helped by the website owners themselves, who provided the information such as key words called Meta tags. The Meta tags give a guide of sorts to the content on the webpage. It was found however that met tags were unreliable for search engines because the webmasters choice of keywords has the potential for being inaccurate and therefore lead someone to the page and not finding what was tagged on the site at all.

Since the meta tag was causing so much problems and was a way to manipulate rank in the search results a new way was sought to rank websites, and two grad students from Stanford, Sergey Brin and Larry Page developed “backrub” a search engine that used a mathematical algorithm to rate the pages importance and today is known as page rank. This is all about the inbound links, and estimates the likelihood that a page will be reached by a web surfer who randomly searches the internet. And most importantly follows links from one website to the next.  This now is known as strong vs. weak links.

Early SEO was mostly about descriptive file names and page titles, as time went on the content became more important to search engines, and content is king became wildly used. By 2003 the search engine became to use semantic elements in search results. This is still a new feature and confused many including those in the SEO arena.

Have a look online for blogs that provide information on SEO. If you look online you will find many blogs, not only finance blogs that provide finance advice, but also SEO relevant information on key SEO issues.

Google today is apparently against any use of black hat SEO tactics and punishes across the board any websites who appear to be using them. The sad part of this is that while they actively shut down and strip rank from websites who use these black hat techniques they themselves sell links and even profit by selling advertising to companies who do this for a business. This has not gone unnoticed by the SEO and web community at large.

An easy way to achieve good SERPS is by using Linkvana. Try Linkvana to access top quality Blogs.