March 23rd, 2010 by Nick

The internet is changing. Of course, it’s one of the most dynamic features of an increasingly fast paced technological world, but against the background of new software, new sites and companies emerging and old ones dying away, there is more gradual shift going on. If changes to individual websites are pebbles bouncing, the move from the web as we knew it a few years ago and what’s being called Web 2.0 is the giant glacier shifting gently underneath. Smart SEO companies are watching the changes with interest.

The internet began as a tool for scientists and engineers. What went on was primarily about getting things accomplished and sharing technical information. It was done from huge mainframe computers in large universities and research organizations like CERN, long before home computers came about. Information was sent from one computer to another in real time and then was saved, where today we have that information permanently available for anyone to see. Although some early internet pioneers played games with text and started to chat, very few people even knew the internet existed.

Fast forward to the late 80s and 90s when the internet was opening up to the whole world and becoming available in people’s own homes through the introduction of personal computers and simple phone line modems. Having your own website was all the rage and the internet we recognise had appeared. It had become the network of individual pages connected by links, which is still most people’s view of the internet.

Yahoo, GeoCities, and a few other early web giants offered free and very easy build-your-own website tools. The overwhelming majority of these sites were built, played with, and forgotten about. They lived on as pages of text with a fancy template background print and maybe some images – numbering in the hundreds and hundreds of thousands. With the boom in personal websites, there was a bit of a race on to make yours the best. For most, good content wasn’t the focus, they were just a novelty to play with.

At the same time, informational resource and useful websites were going up left right and centre. Services we take for granted today, like being able to check the weather forecast online and see what’s on tonight at the local cinema, were starting to become part of the landscape. The problem was that there were some good websites, and some that just contained personal stuff only of relevance to an audience of family and friends. How to find the website you need, in this growing web…

Enter the search engines. And as soon as there were search engines, people wanted to be found in SERPS, and search engine optimization was born. At first, search engines were primitive and trusted html tags to tell them what the website was about. Unethical SEO was soon stuffing these tags full of keyword spam, and the great race between engines and SEO began. Today, the ranking and relevance algorithms are so sophisticated you really do need a great quality website to do well.

The shift we’re seeing now is away from the interlinked pages idea, and towards a more social internet (where social media marketing and social media optimization are going to be much more important). Instead of a homepage, web users are now more likely to have a MySpace or Facebook page and use Twitter to keep in touch with people they know and share information. The whole structure of the internet is changing slowly, and SEO will have to change with it.

Link to us

If you want to link to this blog, copy and paste the following HTML code to your website.