Search engine optimization or SEO is a broad term which evolved to describe the service or technique of performed on a website to make it conform to the rules of the major search engines and render it more "search engine friendly". Initially when the Internet was still a young child, the search engines like WebCrawler and directories like Yahoo were quite happy just listing any and all websites they could get there hands on. Indexing was done either automatically based on the text on the website or via a human who would review the website and index or categorize manually.

 

This method worked quite well until the Internet hit adolescence and spam, porn and gambling got involved. People quickly learned that they could manipulate and trick the search engines and directories by such techniques as repeating key words at the bottom or in the code of the page, later to become known as 'keyword stuffing'. This and a whole host of other sneaky tricks and black hat techniques started to cause the search engines to produce undesirable results. One would search for "Web Design" and the top 5 results would involve online casino's or the latest porn stars biography.

 

Something needed to be done or it wouldn’t be long before the search engines and directories would be rendered useless. Thus began the wars against the black hats. The engines began their fight by creating a rules and guidelines for web masters which needed to be followed in order to get their websites listed and ranked properly. This cleaned things up quite quickly, however it was far from perfect.

 

The black hats weren’t about to give up their ground that easy. They learned new tricks and techniques and the war raged on. Over time the search engines became more and more guarded with what criteria was needed to allow your website to rank well. Part of the philosophy was to keep the black hats in the dark so they couldn’t out smart the engines. The down side to this was your average web designer had their hands full enough just trying to keep up with technology and change for building websites and didn’t pay much attention to what was needed to keep the search engines happy. Thus a specialty industry was born… SEO.