About The The SEO Industry

The concept of search engines began to take shape soon after the first true search facility, Archie, was created by a university student (Alan Emtage) in 1990. A few years later, in 1994 the first search engines as we know them were created, two of them, Yahoo and Lycos remain major properties today.

The Early Days
It was around that time that a few companies began experimenting with the concept of search engine optimisation (sometimes called search engine marketing), with the early emphasis being primarily on the submission process. It was not long before the first automated submission software packages were released, (soon after this the concept of spam reared its head as webmasters began to swamp search results pages by over-submission and other unacceptable practices).

An Uneasy Partnership
As the search engines revised and enhanced their ranking algorithms, web site optimisers discovered new techniques to respond to these strategies, resulting in the development of a "cat and mouse" relationship between the search engines and the SEO industry. The search engines ultimately noted that SEO as an industry was here to stay, and that in order to maintain useful indexes, they would need to accept the industry, (if not exactly embrace it), today many search engines even allow proven ethical SEO companies to become partner sites.

A Billion Dollar Industry
Today online spending reaches into the $billions, in fact Forrester Research estimates that this year, worldwide e-commerce spending will reach $6.8 trillion. Bearing this in mind and that upwards of 85% of Internet users make use of search engines to locate products or services, optimising your website for prominent search engine placement has become a fundamental component of any online business plan. Some of the top corporations in the USA, including the Ford Motor Company, Sharp Electronics and Xerox have active search engine optimisation programs in place and have reported increases of hundreds of percent in online sales as a result.

When you consider that only the top 30 search results will ever generate serious traffic. It won't help a company or its product to rank anywhere below position 30 (or below the third page of search matches). If your Web site is not found in the top 10 to 30 search results in the major search engines and directories, it might just as well not be there at all.