In 1997 when the internet was still in its infancy and commercial internet browsers were very few and far between Search Engine Optimization or (SEO) was a relatively new and foreign term. Before any SEO team could properly optimize a website’s engines to send them to the top, they needed to be able to find a website.
On the late 90’s and early into the new millennium most people (be they IT staff, enthusiasts or even the average internet user) looked at search engines as a way to find whatever they wanted. On one hand these searches were done through the use of web crawlers that searched the public for keywords and then sent them on to the websites whose keywords matched what the user was looking for. On the other hand, on the other hand, others looked upon them as a way to find information or a “people finder” or other research tool that would lend them a level of trust with search engines through rankings and meta-data. While this may honestly have been the majority or majority of people’s way of searching, SEO teams had a choice, either to modify their approach to their search engine optimization process or to stay with the keywords what everyone else was using. Search engines too had to modify their algorithms to send people to the top, and their algorithms helped people who knew how to use relevant keywords and so on, so as to catapult websites to the top.
And it wasn’t until the turn of the millennium that SEO teams had a choice, they could either work based on keywords and meta-data which was deemed to be the way to go, or they could use the new business model of web advertising. Sure, SEO teams were paying attention to ranking keywords and meta data, but they were also paying attention to the methods they could use to get people to their website.
The big thing in the game that really drew SEO teams into making it big was the emergence of Link Your Money to someone Fast!],on a simple site, because from the general public they could see that there wasn’t anything to stop them from making money at a myriad of different ways. The of course they saw that many of these new sites offers presented that same “Get a Website and Making Money While You Sleep” type deal. Companies like Yahoo! paid a lot to have their adverts placed on MSN as their search engine grew more popular.
And thus began the Evolution of Internet Sponsored Advertising. Based on purchases of real sign-up – (people signing up to advertise) sites started offering to link to people’s websites. The more sites that linked to your site, the higher your site ranked on the search engines, the higher you would pay (link) to link to you.
Google wasn’t the first to think of this business model, but they were the one that would end up enjoying the highest gain for the users on the Internet.
Google thought, if the more popular sites in the Internet wanted to get users to link to them, then there probably had to be something in it for them. So they offered the highest payouts, and the highest number of visitors for the new linking sites, which is why so many bloggers and other websites are jumping into the van of linking to Google after all, isn’t Google also in the business of driving users’ to their money making sites?
Not really, and if you think about it, while several thousand bloggers want their sites to appear on the first page of Google (the main source of traffic for website, or part in the larger Internet), Google’s business planning has nothing to do with finding busses around to the door of users. Google does this only to drive users to their money making sites, not to identify the fact that they won’t need to be Fans to sell anything to the advertisers, the money is in the back-end of the sale.
