i posted this on another forum, but i would like to know more....

Just wondering how was seo for search engines to work for you guys between 1990 and 1995 or a bit after.
I did not get the chance to be a webmaster at the time

Just wondering, how hard was it and was the success rates higher than now??

could you share your memories for history

I dont think you would be able to find it . As Internet was not developed at that time

Oh, yeah there was internet starting to blosom. i was in college in 97, and the best search we could get as i remember was from the yahoo directory which was a list of links.

some webmasters said it was all about link exchange and keywords in meta tags. oh well, these days are gone...

how was seo for search engines to work for you guys between 1990 and 1995 or a bit after.

There really wasn't much of anything public on the internet in 1990, the first search engine didn't come about until 1993. SEO didn't even really exist. There was Excite, Lycos, AltaVista, WebCrawler, HotBot, Yahoo, all of which came into existence between 1993 and 1995.

The keywords meta tag was important back then - and it became much abused. Link exchange was also a big thing, but people didn't spend inordinate amounts of time on what we call "SEO". You put a pot load of 'keywords' into the meta tag and that was about it. Unlike today where it borders on fanatical and obsessive!

Anyone with a website in the 90s probably coded it by hand since Dreamweaver hadn't been invented yet. (Adobe PageMill came out in the mid 90s) There wasn't any need to "SEO" websites then because people who actually learned how to code knew the importance of (i.e. a header tag) and used it. The sites looked pretty bad since the geeks who coded them were all about the code and didn't know how to create nice graphics.

LadynRed is right on track with what was going on in the 90s - keyword stuffing was rampant and most of the search returns on the first several pages were bogus because of no REAL keywords.

Keep also in mind that in the early 90's, directories (beginning with Yahoo directory) were the only way to find (or promote) a site on internet.

When search engines began to operate, they were crawling mainly directories in order to find new sites. When Google was launched, it proceeds basically in the same way: it was based on Yahoo and DMOZ data and thereafter also on data from major foreign directories. At that time, Alatavista was the search engine with the large index.

But while ranking in search engines was mainly a matter of meta keywords, google innovated by using the link popularity (its famous PR) as evidence of the quality of a site and then as the key factor of its ranking in SERPs. At the very beginning, SEO consists of stupid things such as writing the most important keywords with a capital letter and repeating those keywords in an intelligent way.

Since amount of sites continued to growth, general directories failed to be an adequate way of searching the web while search engines emerge as the appropriate tool. Then SEO really starts.

Gradually, search engine indexes extended far beyond the directories data. Such a move and the still growing amount of sites boosted SEO.

thannk you all for sharing

those guys most of them would probably be rich by now. imagine the price of domain during that time. competition is so low and as the web grows, they would have made their fortune.

How do you work that out??

There wasn't the huge commercial aspect to the Internet as there is now. People didn't use the medium for a lot of their shopping etc, the upsurge in Internet use didn't really start until faster access become widely available and within the budget of the general populace.
So back then Alta Vista was the top dog and all you needed there was a few html comments

<!-- Put some "keywords" here -->

in your source code and you were off and running.
Because it was so new, being first three or so on the SERP was vital to get visitors, now the searchers have become more savvy so just being first page isn't always a recipe for riches.

Wow, I wasn't a webmaster back than, but I do remember SE's like Lycos and Hotbot (where have they gone?) I was surfing the net using my dial-up access paying 5 cents a minute and racking up quite a phone bill. It was only 10 to 15 years ago, but look how fast it all went from there! Who knows how the Internet will look in another 10 years?

What a good topic. I was just beginning to become what I am today, roughly around 1993. At that time I was 9, addicted to Starcraft, and wanted my own personal page for how cool I was.

Geocites, angelfire free hosting, remember the water reflection java? Ahhh, my old Packard-Bell is around here somewhere..

yeah very right internet started becoming popular after 97.

I remember the internet from last century

Back then a lot of people did it for fun or simply to share information. Apart from getting listed on Yahoo, exchanging links was the way to go - in fact that's what made the whole internet fun to use! Virtually every site had a links page so you'd visit it and get a whole bunch of links to lots of wonderful sites about every subject under the sun - not like nowadays where people are paranoid about linking to "off topic" sites.

I remember surfing for hours going from one site to another and along the way visiting some amazing sites - the best I can do is describe it as a "magical mystery tour" and watching the world open up in front of your eyes.

If you ran your own site, the big measure of success was getting an email from one of your visitors saying how much they liked your site and/or offering a link swap.

Then monetisation came along and spoilt it all

Long live linking to your best mates site just because you want to!

I just want it to know. When exactly SEO starts?

Originally Posted by blue-dreamer

Long live linking to your best mates site just because you want to!

Amen to that

It's the sites that still stick to that maxim that provide the best user experience. Hopping from site to site until something fully unfolds in front of you or just stumbling upon something that you wouldn't have found by any other means available makes you forget that you have been starting to suspect that the web has turned into a big fat dump.

Originally Posted by blue-dreamer

I remember the internet from last century

Back then a lot of people did it for fun or simply to share information. Apart from getting listed on Yahoo, exchanging links was the way to go - in fact that's what made the whole internet fun to use! Virtually every site had a links page so you'd visit it and get a whole bunch of links to lots of wonderful sites about every subject under the sun - not like nowadays where people are paranoid about linking to "off topic" sites.

I remember surfing for hours going from one site to another and along the way visiting some amazing sites - the best I can do is describe it as a "magical mystery tour" and watching the world open up in front of your eyes.

If you ran your own site, the big measure of success was getting an email from one of your visitors saying how much they liked your site and/or offering a link swap.

Then monetisation came along and spoilt it all

Long live linking to your best mates site just because you want to!

Originally Posted by Earnest

Amen to that

It's the sites that still stick to that maxim that provide the best user experience. Hopping from site to site until something fully unfolds in front of you or just stumbling upon something that you wouldn't have found by any other means available makes you forget that you have been starting to suspect that the web has turned into a big fat dump.

I agree wholeheartedly.

That was one of the great attractions of Bulletin Boards (BBs) and when forums started appear. ALL the members shared common interests rather than simply being there for "sig link posting" and you could have intelligent (and sometimes a little heated) discussions with people who were as (or more) interested in the topic as you were.

Originally Posted by vikas1234

I dont think you would be able to find it . As Internet was not developed at that time

haha, i agree with you

Do SEO starts when Google was discovered? Kinda confused.

Google was never "discovered"

SEO or to use a better term of SEP (Promotion) began with engines such as HotBot and AltaVista in or around 1995 (Google didn't launch until 1998) -> http://www.webmaster-talk.com/the-go...ay-google.html <-

I remember the old days of lycos and alta vista search. All you had to do was stuff your keyword tags and every other tag and stuff the page full of it as well. Shame some people seem to think you can still do that 12+ years on!