Why everyone wants search engine optimization?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a new technique introduced a couple of years back in time. The main purpose of SEO is to make your website appear in the top 10 or 20 results on search engine result pages. Google played a very important role in all this by setting up some standards for websites designing and developing. Google being the top search engine on the Internet hold a kind of minoply over the Internet. Today I would like to shed a light on search engine optimization that why everyone is running for it?

During this last decade the Internet related computer industry grew bigger and bigger on hourly basis. The following image can show you the growth rate of Websites on the Internet over the last few years.

The above statistics are provided by NetCraft

In this above figure you can see the growth rate of websites coming live on Internet in the few years. The problem started after 2005 when almost everyone, even a school guy who knows how to use computer started building his website and putting it live online. With this huge rate of growth school boys came out of an idea of having their own web developers company and started putting up websites online for their clients. In all this haste of website development millions of website came online in no time and the traffic on Internet jumbled up.

Then during the same time Google had been working on it and was fore-seeing the rush of websites on the Internet. They started developing standards for website, plus the W3C organization was also continuously putting up new standards and data-types for html and other Internet related web languages. (You can see my previous post on 5 SEO Tips to keep in mind while making a website)

Within no time this simple market of Internet industry became the fish-market and tons of websites were online, developed by non-professional people. I even came across many websites in the past few years which were actually built in Microsoft Word and were then published online. Google at that time was expanding massively too with their crawlers hitting each and every website found on the Internet and resulting in a junk. All the junk pages started getting listed in the search engines especially Google. I still remember, like two years back I left searching with Google and shifted to Yahoo!. The reason was, Google started listing a lot of extra pages in the search engine and the actual thing which I was searching for used to get lost in between the hundred-thousand results searched by Google. If I figured this thing out, then I guess Google figured it too!

Companies started to realize that only having a website on the Internet is not just enough for their businesses (I remember even a general store or a small movie rental store started to have their website online). Having a website on the Internet became a trend instead of the real usage of a website. Now at this time (around the start of year 2006) search engine optimization broke out into the market with a boom. The thing was, hundreds and thousands of companies already had their websites built but they were useless (because as I earlier mentioned, that having a website was a trend). Their websites were never visited, nor were listed in any search engine. This is were the web development industry bumped a little, because almost 60% of the business in USA had their website already built but now they wanted it to be in the search engine.

So even today at the end of year 2008 millions of companies around the world have their websites up and running but not optimized for the search engines. The websites exists but they are either not at all listed in search engines or they are on somewhere like 1049th page of the search engine result page (SERP). Now those companies are investing huge amount of money into the SEO to get their website on a better result page. US$8,000 – US$10,000 is like a normal fees the SEO companies charge their clients now a days. Even a very small company charge like US$3,000 to US$5,000 for search engine optimization a website.

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