SEO is simply an end that justifies the means of placing a website on the first page of Google and Yahoo on the left hand side of the screen or “organic” side. All other search engines are negligible, including MSN/Live and Ask.com, formerly Ask Jeeves. Google currently controls almost 70% of the market in the U.S. Thus, SEO must be targeted specifically to Google.

Google’s lead engineer is a man named Matt Cutts. Besides the founder, he alone determines how Google’s algorithms will evaluate sites.  No one really knows how Google crawls or looks at sites and evaluates them. That is why they are trading at upwards on $500 per share. However, because Google thinks they are truly a noble company for the good of mankind that seeks to destroy the evil Microsoft, Matt Cutts makes a lot of the criteria that he uses public. He even has a blog, 

SEO dates back to the early 90’s when the first search engines were being developed. It is little known that the first effective search engine was based off of software that could read websites to the blind under the U.S. Rehabilitation Act Section 508 and the World Wide Web Consortium’s content accessibility guidelines. The programs looked at specific lines of code (website language) that did not affect the look of sites. Before this the websites searches could only look at the title file names of websites and text within the site. The problem was that this didn’t necessarily tell the search what the site was about. As more and more sightless people began using the internet, more companies began inserting this code into their HTML tags.