Way back when people began showing up online the internet was still in its early stages. Getting your site listed well, at first, was a piece of cake, but as more and more sites came around it become more and more difficult to be in the #1 position. Back then there was a lot of experimenting to do in order to get any site listed at all. Optimization was an unknown and no one knew what made the engines tick, or how their algorithms worked. I remember trying things without really having any idea if it would work or not, or if it would really make any difference at all. Over the years there was a lot of experimentation done and the rewards of all this is that today we know what works and what doesn’t and we know exactly what type of changes need to happen to a website in order for it to rise in the listings.

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.

After a while the engines started to become a little more sophisticated. The title tag was perhaps one of the first things that turned up as something you could do to help your sites’ listings beyond the meta tags. The engines had now realized that they needed to find other ways to figure out which site was the best out of what was there. The meta tags were simply abused to the max. These were very exciting times. The internet was growing in leaps and bounds and websites were cropping up by the thousands. Never has there been a more exciting time of life in recent history.

Back when SEO really became a necessity for an online business to succeed at all, the entire process was really just developing. We hadn’t any idea exactly what was going on with the algorithms, except that there were certain things that definitely needed to get done in order to rank well. There was also that far left side, the dark side, where things had to be not done and avoided like the plague. This was a time when SEO people, who were worth their salaries, were in demand and simply had to be used by any serious online business.

Today it is a whole new story. Everything that will get you ranked well is pretty much out in the open and common knowledge. Optimization has turned into a set situation and pretty much the same thing gets done from one site to another with those inbound links being probably the most important, and hardest to come by, part of the puzzle. It is no longer top secret stuff that only a handful of really good SEO people can do for you. Now, you can learn SEO yourself and you can optimize your own websites and you can do it successfully too with just a bit of SEO training through a simple training course in optimization.

SEO has changed immensely over the years. Today it has become a standard part of web development, although don’t expect every designer to optimize your site as they build it … there still seems to be some block between SEO and web designers. Everything about SEO today however is more cut and dry than it has ever been. It’s a set of changes to make, a structured navigation system and site layout and then the acquisition of inbound links which should be thoroughly explained in any course, or any blog or forum, dedicated to optimization. You can learn how to do it yourself!

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.

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