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Back in the “olden days,” placing nice and high in the search results was not a big issue. There were few sites. In 1992 there were fewer than 20,000 domains, and the search engines had relatively primitive ranking algorithms or formulas. Many of the search engines worked on a LIFO principle, so to stay on top you re-submitted every couple of weeks. There were software tools that did the submissions and re-submissions for you that weren’t rejected by the search engines.

When Google appeared in 1998, it changed the search world. People found that Google was providing much better results than the other search engines, and it quickly became the favorite of most of the online world. The reason for the better results in large part was due to the link popularity element in its algorithm. Google’s premise was that if a lot of sites are providing a link to a particular site, it must be a good site; no one provides a link to a mediocre site.

The second generation brought more sophisticated algorithms and formulas. Internet marketers learned as much as they could about these algorithms and optimized pages of their Web sites accordingly. Of course, the search engines weren?t releasing too much information on their formulas because that was their “Colonel Sanders recipe.” If they provide their formula details to you they also provide it to their competitors.

Methodologies for optimizing your site for the search engines started to appear, and these are still relevant today. Our methodology for optimization is provided step-by-step in great detail in 101 Ways to Promote Your Web Site, and you will find details in the Resources section of http://www.susansweeney.com as well as in Susan’s newsletter archives on her site. In a nutshell, the methodology includes:

1. Determine the search engines you want to focus on. These usually will be the most heavily used search engines.
2. Learn as much as you can about their algorithms or formulas for ranking sites.
3. Determine the keywords and keyword phrases you want to focus on with the search engines. You will need to do a fair bit of research in this area to finalize your selection. Tools like WordTracker provide great intelligence.
4. Allocate different keywords and keyword phrases to different pages of your Web site based on the content.
5. Populate the respective pages of the site with the assigned keywords/keyword phrases appropriately. The keywords/ keyword phrases need to be included in:
   1. The domain name or file extension for that page of the site. For example, for a page that was being optimized for the term “web development,” you would use http://www.verbinteractive.com/webdevelopment.html
   2. The page title
   3. The text of the page. At the time of publication of this book, the keyword phrase would be included at the very beginning, the middle, and the end of the page. It would be repeated about five times and would have a keyword density of no less than 3 percent and no higher than 12 percent.
   4. In the alt tags
   5. In the headers
   6. In the keyword meta-tags
   7. In the description meta-tags
   8. Comments tag.

Online marketers were also aware of the offsite ranking criteria that were included in the formulas and, wherever possible, developed strategies to score high there as well. These elements included things like:

1. Link popularity
2. Link relevancy
3. Keyword being searched on in the text around the link
4. Click-throughs from search results and length of stay
5. Site traffic
6. Length of domain registration
7. Frequency of updates
8. Google page rank.

So here we are in the early stages of the third generation where many of the elements of generation 1 and generation 2 are still valid but they are just a part of the equation. These evolving formulas are difficult to keep current in a printed book, so I’ll refer you back to the resources and newsletter archive on http://www.susansweeney.com. The formulas are continually being enhanced and different weighting is given to different elements in the algorithm.

The third-generation search engines’ algorithms continue to enhance the results provided whenever a search is performed. In the future, quite likely the results will be different for different people doing a search of the same keyword or keyword phrase. The formula will likely take into consideration things like:

1. User preferences
2. User past selections. If in the past you have done a number of searches for “windows” because you were doing a home renovation project and always selected the sites that related to house windows rather than the Microsoft Windows - referenced sites, the search engine would learn from your past selections and provide results related to house windows.
3. Your geographic location
4. Your demographic and psychographic history
5. The time of the day the search was performed.

The search engines will build a profile on each user based on sites visited, sites clicked through from search results, how long he or she stayed on those sites, etc., to be able to provide the best results for you.

The search engines will also continue to weed out inappropriate sites from their databases. They are already doing a decent job on this, eliminating sites that are trying to manipulate the search results by using doorway or gateway pages, duplicate sites, link farms, multiple links with exactly the same text around the link, and other manipulative techniques.

In this third generation we certainly have seen a search explosion - We can now search for videos, images, and maps as well as search locally. Each of these can require its own strategy for organic search engine optimization. For example, with videos, important keywords in the video filename as well as in all the appropriate places on the page that the video file is found are important for ranking consideration.

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