There’s a lot to know about keywords and phrases and how they’ve been used throughout the years. This is the first in a two-part series that will discuss the history, efficacy, and methodology of the use of keywords and phrases as an SEO tactic and online optimization tool.
The first post is a brief discussion of the history of keywords. Be sure to stay tuned for the next post in the series.
What are Keywords?
Keywords are the ideas and topics that electronically link your audience to your content. In regard to SEO, they’re the words and phrases people enter into search engines to quickly gain the information they seek.
In the early years of my writing career, a client asked me if I knew SEO. I had vaguely heard of it, but wasn’t that familiar. He gladly explained his understanding of the subject; what keywords were and how I should jam as many as possible into the articles I wrote for him. This, he explained, would rank him higher in the search engines.
Being young and inexperienced, I still didn’t fully understand. Frankly, I didn’t care to. The authenticity of my writing voice and the content of my articles mattered more than shoving words in where they didn’t belong. I used keywords or phrases where appropriate, but I refused to write garbage.
In the early days of SEO, there were few rules for connecting users to valuable content. Keyword stuffing, what my client wanted me to do, was one of the many shady tactic’s marketers were using at the time. Keywords were loaded into a website’s meta tags, visible content or backlink anchor text to generate unfair rank advantages in search engines. This is also considered webspam or spamdexing.
Today, search engines use algorithms that recognize keyword stuffing and reduce or eliminate unfair search advantages. It may even lead to a website being banned or penalized temporarily or permanently.
What prompted the use of keywords and phrases?
The internet is a vast place. You can find information on just about any topic you can think of. It’s so woven into the fabric of our lives that I find it hard to remember ever being without. But of course, we all know it hasn’t been around forever.
The worldwide web began with the first website founded by Tim Berners-Lee on August 6, 1991. It wouldn’t be long and others would pop up. With a growing number of websites and information, it became clear that there needed to be a way for internet users to find and organize distributed data. Search engines soon came along to satisfy that need.
A Few Early Search Engines:
Excite, one of the earliest search engines, was born in February 1993 by six undergraduate students from Stanford University. They used statistical analysis of word relationships to improve search relevance on the internet. This method made it easier to find information by sorting results based on keywords within a website’s content and backend optimization. It filled a need for structure and accessibility.
Yahoo! came along next in 1994 as a respected site directory. Webmasters and site owners would fill out forms to submit their websites. For several years, Yahoo! used human editors to catalogue these sites. They used secondary search engine services like Inktomi and Google to support their directory. By 2002, they followed a movement to crawler-based listings for their search results because so many submissions were spam – and stuffed with keywords.
Google was founded in 1997 by Stanford University PHD students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. They wanted to design a search engine based on relevancy ranking. They believed search engines should rank websites based on the number of times search terms appeared on web pages. They set out to refine the way users found information. Over the years they enforced stricter regulations on keywords, content quality, and have strived to create a level playing field for all.
It’s been a long path to where we are today, but Google’s goal to create a great user experience over beating search engine algorithms has prevailed. A colossal shift in the practice of using keywords and phrases has occurred. It still has its place in SEO, but littering your content in the manner that my early client requested, is no longer acceptable. Ethical practices and authentic content that builds relationships is valued higher by both humans and search engines.
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