SEO or Search Engine Optimization started back in the early 90's which focused simply on site submission. Site owners submit their sites to hundreds, if not thousands, of search engines with hopes of getting the number one spot in the search results page. Search engines, on the other hand, had an indexing programs that used "robots" or "spiders" to crawl or go through all pages of the site and their corresponding HTML codes.

Back then, restricted by technology and bandwidth, search engines relied solely on meta-tags in the page head containing page names, keywords and descriptions which served as a guide to the contents of every page. However, the search results returned proved to be inaccurate and inconsistent, with pages failing to rank for relevant searches yet being able to rank for irrelevant ones.

Irrelevant keywords were also placed in the sites to imitate an increase in page impressions and for ad revenue too. In addition to these abuses, various HTML attributes were also easily manipulated by site owners and webmasters to get a higher ranking.

The only really accurate searches in the early days came from indexes like Yahoo, which was founded in 1994 by two Ph.D. candadates in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, David Filo and Jerry Yang. Yahoo (an acronym for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle" started life as David and Jerry's personal index of internet bookmarks and grew quickly into a formidable index which returned accurate, but limited search matches due to the limitations of manual indexing.

In 1998 however, two new Ph.D. students from that same program at Stanford University embarked on a progrject that would change Internet searching forever and create a whole new industry of people who called themselves 'link builders'.

Google slowly moved into the limelight. Before its rise to stardom, Google was known as the "backrub", a brilliant innovation from Larry Page and Sergey Brin who were both Stanford graduates . Backrub served as the thesis for their Computer Science PhDs and with amazing foresight, Stanford University assisted in funding the creation of this search engine. In fact, Google was first launched on the university's website: google.stanford.edu before Google.com was registered in 1997. Up until now, Stanford University remains to be one Google's shareholders.

Google used a mathematical algorithm to figure out a website's standing. This is when the Page Rank -- the quantity and strength of the inbound links found within the site, was created. A site's page rank together with Hyperlink analysis and some on-page factors helped Google do away with the manipulation and abuse that had previously terrorized search engines.

But with an advancement in technology comes an increase in knowledge. Despite the advances that search engines make, site owners and webmasters are also constantly finding ways to beat them. As technology grows -- giving search engines more complicated and complex algorithms, so does the intellect of webmasters worldwide in moving past their new ways. This is why search engines refuse to divulge the criteria and ranking algorithms that they are using. With very little real SEO information to go on, webmasters and SEO specialists have to test theories until they find something that works - and a visit to any SEO forum will tell you how much opinions vary amoung these experts.

So the basis of the search engine's ranking algorithm will probably always remain a mystery. But there is one golden rule: Anything automated is frowned on by search engines, particularly Google and your website will be penalized and will disappear from search engine results sooner or later