This presented a conundrum for early internet visitors as the vast amount of information on the web was still mostly unavailable to them under this search system. It was a bit like visiting a bookshop but only being able to look at books by authors that you were already familiar with. This heralded the arrival of a number of businesses which called themselves Search Engines. These businesses realised how important it was to websites to get people viewing their pages, and decided to attempt to create a system of enriching the results that were returned when someone searched for a general word or phrase rather than typing in a specific website address.

Initial attempts to design such a system were somewhat at the mercy of the webmasters who programmed websites for their employers. All search engines were reliant upon the text and coding behind any given website, and the first search engines generally utilised the repeated appearance of keywords as their source for returning results. But webmasters swiftly realised that they could swiftly improve their Online Marketing results simply by filling their website with the same keywords far too many times, or adapting the keywords within the metatags in the site’s coding so that the website would cheat the search engine into believing that its content was more appropriate than it actually was.

Since the reputation and success of the search engine companies was completely dependent on its capability to return good quality and relevant results, it was imperative that the search engines identified an improved way of measuring how relevant the Search Engine Placement of a specific website might be. As a result they began to develop more sophisticated means of measuring a website’s relevance by creating more elaborate algorithms which included external factors in addition to ‘on page’ keywords, thus making it much more complicated for webmasters to manipulate web pages that they had written.

One of the earliest innovators of this new way of monitoring search results was Google, which was set up in 1998, and swiftly attracted a dedicated user base. This institution has regularly been at the leading edge of attempts to ensure that unscrupulous Search Engine Placement is swiftly identified and the appropriate steps taken to block any websites using unethical Online Marketing techniques.

In recognition of the Search Engines’ need to provide the most reliable set of results for any online search, companies soon realised that it was beneficial to explore ethical ways of enhancing their chances of achieving a front page results listing for their website and this resulted in the arrival of the Search Engine Optimisation Company. These businesses employ a team of experts who will assess an existing website against actual search results and trends, recommend changes to improve its online standing and then work away from the website to provide off page optimisation which will improve its reputation still further. And what’s more, any decent, respected Search Engine Optimisation Company will do all of this in a manner which is completely acceptable to the online community, which means that in the end, the website itself gains additional visitors, all of those visitors will find the website appropriate to their search and the search engine will enrich its reputation for being reliable.

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