What is SEO (Search engine optimization) and its history?

The process of affecting the visibility of a website in a web search engine. In general, it is an area of website development that seeks to improve the way content is ranked by search engines in organic search results. Various approaches are taken to achieve that goal.

Although there are many authorized companies that help Web sites to improve their rankings, according to Google's page about SEO.

History

Content providers and webmasters brought optimizing sites in the process for search engines in the mid-1990s.Initially, all webmasters submitted the address of a page to the various engines which would send a "spider" to "crawl" that page with extracting links to other pages from it and return information found on the page to be indexed. The process involves a search engine spider downloading a page and storing it on the search engine's own server. Indexer extracts information about the page, and then information was placed into a scheduler for crawling at a later date. 

Site owners recognized the value of visibility and high ranking in search engine results, creating an opportunity for both "white hat" and "black hat" SEO practitioners. According to industry analyst Danny Sullivan, SEO probably came into use in 1997, and Bruce Clay was the first person who popularized the term. In 2007, Jason Gambert attempted the term SEO to the Trademark Office in Arizona by convincing that SEO is involving manipulation of keywords and not a marketing service.

A prior variety of search algorithms bargained on the keyword meta tag that provides a guide to each page's content or index files in engines. Using meta data to index pages was found to be less than reliable. Web content providers manipulated some attributes within the HTML source of a page in an attempt to rank well in search engines. 

By 1997, search engine designers recognized that webmasters were making efforts to manipulate their rankings in search results by stuffing pages with excessive or irrelevant keywords. Early search engines adjusted their algorithms to prevent webmasters from manipulating rankings.

In 2005, an annual conference, AIRWeb, Adversarial Information Retrieval on the Web was created to bring together practitioners and researchers concerned with search engine optimization and related topics.  

Companies that employ overly aggressive techniques can get their client websites banned from the search results. In 2005, the Wall Street Journal reported on a company, Traffic Power, which allegedly used high-risk techniques and failed to disclose those risks to its clients. 

Important search engines have also reached out to the SEO industry, and are frequent guests at SEO conferences, chats, and seminars. Major search engines provide information and guidelines to help with site optimization. Sitemaps programs are used to help webmasters learn if Google is having any problems indexing their website and also provides data on Google traffic to the website. Bing Webmaster Tools gives wayfor webmasters to submit a sitemap and web feeds. It also allows users to determine the crawl rate, and track the web pages index status.