i-Search Engines

A number of articles and white papers have been written on this topic. Before the days of Google and Web 2.0 there was little attention paid to the topic of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). In the early days of the Internet Era you could get a site listed on Yahoo! or Altavista by merely submitting it. As long as it wasn't too complicated for search engines to understand you could get your site listed within 2 to 3 days. But Yahoo! and Altavista couldn't keep up with the flood of URL submissions. As web evolved, more and more companies began to embrace the online medium and the potential for using it as a marketing tool.

In the late 90's something dramatic happened. Google introduced PageRank, a system of ranking Web pages based on their importance and other factors. Google searchbots (or spiders) crawl through the world wide web following links, indexing and categorizing pages based on their content and relevancy. The more links a page has, the more likely they will be picked up and indexed by searchbots. In order to allow spiders to understand the site content, web masters needed to follow certain rules like placing proper keywords, title tags and content in each web page. At this point search became more of an art than a science. Companies can no longer expect to simply add their sites to directories and wait for them to appear on the top of search engine results.