The virtual world and the real world are almost the same now. Operating systems that are fully online such as Chrome OS on our reality and data management services such as Google Apps now operate fully in the Cloud. At the same time, this has changed the face of competition with companies such as Microsoft and Google becoming incredibly fierce. Apparently, by 2020, digital marketing and search engine optimization will have reached full evolution, although that does not mean things will suddenly stop. To get to that point, however, it is important to understand where everything came from as well.
The Evolution of Digital Marketing and Search Engine Optimization
The concept of digital marketing was popularized when Google became the dominant search engine provider. Google was founded in 1998 by Stanford University PhD candidates Larry Page and Sergey Brin. This is when things truly started. At that point, digital marketing was simply a way of promoting websites online, getting traffic to those websites, and turning that traffic into paying customers.
Before Google, digital marketing was incredibly simple and there were only limited steps to follow. But when Google happens, things started to change. Certainly, new digital marketing techniques were developed and search engines, Google in particular, became the be all and end all of the virtual world. To ensure there were fair competition practice, different techniques were developed by the different search engines and that was the start of search engine optimization or SEO.
SEO was developed during the 1990s by sites such as lycos and Ask Jeeves. Initially, it was all about stuffing the meta description and website content with keywords. From here came the backlink concept, which is basically a virtual system of voting period this meant that, initially, SEO was a numbers game. The more keywords and the more backlinks someone could put on a website and the higher they would rank. Google changed all of this.
When Google introduced the Google Bot and Google Pagerank, quality suddenly became of importance. When backlinks came from authority websites such as those that end it with .mil, .edu, .gov or websites that were classed as media websites, they would rank higher. In those days, there were hidden forums in which SEO techniques and strategies were discussed but this no longer exists as it is classed as a black hat technique, which is unethical and leads to Google penalties.
Today’s world of SEO is incredibly complex and has to follow a lot of different rules. One key Thing Remains and that is that content is King. However, how this content is delivered must follow very specific rules. Keyword stuffing, which basically means repeating the same period over and over again, is no longer allowed and will actually cost website dearly in terms of their page rankings. Backlinks still have to be from High authority websites. Many other rules and regulations now exist and they are also frequently updated so that the game will continue to be interesting to play.