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Once upon a time, the search engines relied on META tags: keywords (especially keywords), titles and descriptions. There was no need to optimize a website, there was no need to hire professional content writers to create valuable web content, no one cared about keyword density on pages.

Once upon a time, being on the Web was not so costly. There was no such thing as 'valid html'; no one tried to impress you with a Flash site' It was all simply the Web's Stone Age. Oh, the good old days! It used to be so easy to influence the search engines and get high placements in their result pages! And no one really cared about web standards, design techniques, or patterns. The prehistoric search engines were nothing more than word matching filters. All that, no longer than fifteen years ago!

From the very beginning of the search engine era, webmasters understood the importance of high rankings and some started using 'black magic' approaches: keyword stuffing, doorway pages, adding text with the same color as the background and other unethical techniques.

Let's Talk Dinosaurs

The first search engines, now extinct, were Archie and Gopher. As a matter of fact they were not really search engines, but tools used to collect data from the web. For example Gopher was indexing text documents. A new Web era began with the birth of Wandex (now extinct) and Aliweb. Aliweb is really the Web's oldest search engine. However, neither Wandex, nor Aliweb influenced the Web as much as WebCrawler. This was the first full text crawler based search engine ever.

WebCrawler set the standards for the modern search engines. Since 1994 (the year WebCrawler was born) creating web content, search engine friendly websites and being number one in the search engine results, transformed the Internet.

Yahoo! and Google, the present Giants, are also very old: Yahoo was born in 1995 and Google one year later. As you see, it's not always the first born that takes over and leads the family business. Google and Yahoo have always been competing. While Yahoo! was more of a directory than a search engine, Google (once called 'BackRub') based its rankings on link popularity to determine the importance of a website.

The Modern SEO Challenge

In 1994 it was easy to get good rankings in the search engine results. This could be done by simply submitting websites into web directories and search engines. Today however there is no such a thing as overnight success. Now the Web is all about challenge, competition, web analysis, web stats, search engine algorithms, online branding, online public relations, new media, blogging, getting the best SEO software, the best SEO tools, and much-much more. This is all for achieving web supremacy: high rankings in the SERPs.

GoTo.com introduced Pay Per Click in 1997 and is now called Overture. The technology had a simple idea: human edited search engine submissions. It worked because the results were definitely better than the automated process. GoTo.com started selling traffic, and other web Giants soon copied the PPC model: Google AdWords, Yahoo, etc.

Yes, things have changed over the past 15 years but with hard work and dedication, high search engine ranking can still be achieved.