It is a popular belief that SEO actually started from a call. Definitely very unlikely since such a technical thing started after a rock band named “Jefferson Starship” manager Bill Thompson, called the VP of Cybernautic in an angry tone.
Reason? Band’s official site was ranked below other sites on Page no 4.
The band was very popular at that time so there were many other sites writing about this band. At that time, even mentioning the keyword enough times on website made it rank.
The official website did not rank for this reason. They fixed it by writing “Jefferson Starship” in big letters on the website. After his, the website got ranked on the 1st page.
The official Jefferson Starship website
SEO term originated around 1997 when Multimedia Marketing Group was using the term.
In 1994, Two tech-savvy students from Stanford University, Jerry Wang and David Filo, hatched the idea for Yahoo. Yahoo started as a directory of Internet favorites and a who’s-who list of the coolest websites.
To get their pages to show up on Yahoo, webmasters had to physically submit their site for consideration, like a job application.
In 1996, Sergey Brin and Larry Page build a website named “Backrub” that was used to rank sites based on link qualities present on the website. At the same times, HotBot, powered by Inktomi, also was launched.
Backrub would later become Google as we know it today.
So now these three pioneers respectively worked on their sites.
But in 2000, Yahoo took quite a big decision. They teamed up with Google, who was also a search engine back then, but not very popular.
The result was a disaster. Every Yahoo search was labeled as “Powered by Google”. They played a big role in introducing Google to the whole world!
Before that, search engines mainly ranked sites based on the content on the page, the domain name, directory listings, and basic website design.
But then Google came along with their innovative AI technology, and revolutionized search engines.”
Google’s algorithm was more inclined towards users experience which made it very successful in no time. It outperformed all the major search engines and up till today, it is the most widely used search engines.