When Did SEO Become Popular? (Answered)-SEO

SEO, or search engine optimization, is the practice of improving a website’s visibility and relevance for search engines and users.

But when did SEO become popular?

When did it emerge as a vital and competitive field in digital marketing?

In this article, we will explain when SEO became popular as a strategy for website owners to gain a competitive advantage for their online businesses.

When Did SEO Become Popular?

SEO became popular in the early 1990s as a way to optimize websites for the first search engines. SEO quickly rose in popularity to help websites rank higher for relevant keywords, drive more organic traffic, and increase conversions and revenue.

SEO Became Popularized By Early Search Engines

As explained in our article on When Did SEO Start, the first website was launched in 1991 by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. However, it was not until 1993 that the first web search engine, Wandex, was created by Matthew Gray.

Wandex was followed by other early search engines, such as Aliweb (1992), JumpStation (1993), Excite (1993), Infoseek (1994), Lycos (1994), Yahoo (1994), and AltaVista (1995).

These early search engines relied on simple algorithms that ranked web pages based on keywords and meta tags. They also used human-edited directories to categorize and list websites. However, they were not very sophisticated or accurate, and they were vulnerable to spam and manipulation through keyword stuffing.

As a result, SEO was a popular technique to rank websites higher on the search engine results pages (SERPs) by adding targeted keywords to the HTML code. However, the official term for SEO was technically used yet by website owners or digital marketing specialists. These people were using the techniques and advantages of SEO, but not labeling it as such.

As explained in our other article about Who Invented SEO, the first recorded usage of the term “search engine optimization” is dated back to 1997. SEO then became popular in 1998 when the Google Search engine was released by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Stanford University students who developed a new algorithm called PageRank that measured the quality and quantity of links pointing to a web page, and used it as a signal of authority and relevance.

The new Google PageRank algorithm changed how SEO worked and made SEO even more popular. No longer were web pages ranked solely on the use of keywords on the page, but not required links from other sites as a voting method for the quality and trust of that content. This increased the popularity of using SEO to rank websites because the methods got more complex, and made it more of a challenge to figure out how to optimize for keyword rankings.

Summary for When SEO Became Popular

As you can see, SEO became popular in the early 1990s as a way to optimize websites for the first search engines. However, website owners and digital marketing specialists were not officially using the term to describe what they were doing to achieve higher rankings in the early search engines. SEO quickly rose in popularity after Google Search was released to help websites rank higher for relevant keywords based on the new PageRank algorithm.

The Editorial Staff at SEO Chatter is a team of search engine optimization and digital marketing experts led by Stephen Hockman with more than 15 years of experience in search engine marketing. We publish guides on the fundamentals of SEO for beginner marketers.