Odom - SEO For 2016 The Complete Do-It-Yourself SEO Guide

In early 1999, I was elected president of the Sacramento Cisco Users Group just shortly after I wrote my third Cisco Certification book. The users group was dedicated to getting its members certifications, access to training on routers, switches, and using hardware to give better quality of service (QoS) to the local networks and web servers.

Just a year later the users group had over 1,000 members and people would arrive from the Bay Area which was a two hour drive to attend the meetings. If you have been in the computer industry for any length of time I am sure you can remember the Y2K issue and after the fear subsided many IT experts were looking for other careers. Many were focused on creating web servers and using Cisco devices to make the high traffic websites accessible across multiple servers. This kept the users web experiences fast and friendly but also eliminated a point of failure. If one of the web servers failed another one was there to keep the website up.

Yahoo! AltaVista, and AOL were the primary search engines at the time. As members in the group started to learn HTML and creating websites they started to ask what, "How do we do so well with the search engines? One of the early speakers at the group was Mike Monahan from Excite, then later Lycos. He was responsible for creating algorithms and keeping SPAM off the first few pages of the search results.

It pretty easy to tank back then. Add some good Meta tags and put the words on the page which you wanted to be found for. Back then it was really that simple to optimize your website. There was a second part and that was to submit your website to all the search engines one by one manually by using their submission URL's to submit your website over and over until each search engine started looking at your website.

In the year 2000, I was also teaching Cisco and Microsoft certification classes in Plano, Texas. The topic we were discussing was brought up about a group I represented in the Sacramento area whose main goal was to market to the search engines. Questions were asked by the attendees on what we did and the different topics we addressed. One of the members of the group was Ted Nugent, who at the time was an editor for the quite popular PC Computing magazine.

A few weeks after the class was over I received a call from Ted about wanting me to write an article which explained what was needed to be done in HTML to get your website to be found by the search engines especially Yahoo! and Excite which were the most popular at the time.

That article was published in November of 2000 and was titled "Optimizing Your Website for Search Engines". Soon that article was copied, rewritten and posted all over the world. More people have made minor changes to that article and called it theirs than I think any other article ever posted on the Internet. Today most every book and text on Internet history credits me with starting the term Search Engine Optimization (SEO) which was first used in that article. Had I only known how popular it would become at the time and I had the forethought to get the domain name SEO.COM.