SEO's Popularity Growing | | | | Search engines have been around since the 1940s but the modern ones came about only in the 1990s. The usage of search engines continues to be of great significance to various types of web users all over the world. Their usefulness in search optimization has already been proven especially for web users looking for information on a wide variety of things including products and services. They have also been helpful for people wanting to do business online like buying and selling items. | | | Search engine optimization or SEO is all about improving the volume and quality of traffic to a particular site. It has undergone positive changes through the years, thanks to major search engines that are concerned about providing quality search results to web users. In its early days, search engines can already give rankings to sites based on content, formatting and metadata tags. However, all that has changed after search engines like Google discovered that some webmasters have tricked them by using fake materials. The result? Google has become stricter with its rules on ranking websites. More than content, a website now has to prove its relevance to the search requested by users.
In the beginning, there was only the original Excite or AltaVista search engines. And then came Google which started ranking sites based on how frequent other sites link to your website and other essential factors pointing to relevancy. Other major search engines have come in the picture like Yahoo! and MSN but Google remains very effective. Truth is, most of these search engines have adapted the techniques that Google popularized. The reason, perhaps, is that Google’s search rankings are free of charge, unbiased and cannot be purchased thereby attracting an increasing number of loyal users.
| | | SEO’s growing popularity is also evident in its usage in the marketing aspect of businesses. Being a vital part of web marketing, many business firms have incorporated this segment in their marketing plan in the hopes of getting more customers and improving sales. Companies have acknowledged the significance of being on the internet and the fact that if they focus on improving their websites notably content and keywords relevant to their products or services as well as their field of business, there’s a great chance that they will get a high ranking in search results.
Of course, a good way of gauging the SEO trend today is through an analysis of search engine usage. A March 2007 survey by Skooiz, a Canadian media and search engine advertising firm, on internet usage and behavior of French Canadians found that majority or 80 percent use Google in their searches followed by Yahoo at 3.6 percent and MSN at 2.5 percent. The reason for this is that there are not so many multi-language search engines yet.
As for the American market, comScore revealed that for the month of May 2007, Google had 50.7 percent share followed by Yahoo at 26.4 percent, MSN at 10.3 percent, Ask Network at five percent and Time Warner Network at 4.6 percent. For the whole month of May, Americans conducted 7.6 billion searches, up by 11 percent from the previous year.
These statistics only prove that SEO plays a key role in the different aspects of the internet. It is seen to continue growing and improving as long as web users keep using these search engines.
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