Following the success of A Webmaster's Guide to Search Engines, Danny Sullivan launched Search Engine Watch, a website dedicated to providing news about the search industry, tips on how to search the web, and information on how to better rank websites. SEO stands for search engine optimization. Rand Fishkin, founder and former CEO of Moz, defines the term as “the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic obtained through organic search engine results.
Search engine optimization
(SEO) is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or web page from search engines.SEO focuses on unpaid traffic (known as natural or organic results) rather than direct traffic or paid traffic. Unpaid traffic can come from different types of searches, such as image search, video search, academic search, news search, and industry-specific vertical search engines. In 1998, Sergei Brin and Lawrence Page, the creators of Google, published an article entitled “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine” as part of their research project while studying at Stanford University. In it, they wrote that “the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising.
The objectives of the advertising business model do not always correspond to offering quality search to users. It's important to note here that you did this based on the quality of the content and not just the search keyword. Many search engines have risen and dusted over the years, unlike Google, which seems to be going from strength to strength. Here's a comparison of SEO tactics over the centuries and the impact they've had on the way searches work on all devices.
The person's name is Jason Gambert and he has filed an application with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, claiming to have coined the term “SEO” (for search engine optimization). As a person (together with my partner Leland Harden) who coined the term search engine optimization in 1995, I feel uniquely qualified to comment on the validity of Gambert's statement.