SEO is more than just a new marketing buzz word. Search engine optimization works on many of the fundamental principles which have shaped internet commerce for nearly two decades, and will continue to do so well into the future. Although search engines did not always exist at the scale that they currently do, SEO has played a major role in defining which businesses have come out ahead of the others in terms of their visibility on the internet. It was not until after the Dot-com bubble burst of the early 2000s, however, that SEO truly become recognized for what it can do for both large and small businesses alike.
After the initial collapse of online commerce, SEO was one of the examples of how to do business the right way. Whereas many businesses collapsed due to simply providing hype through commercials and traditional media, SEO ensured that customers who were looking for keywords on search engines found the sites that utilized optimization. In other words, while other electronic commerce sites were spending a good deal of money on advertising to people who may not have even been frequent or even part time online shoppers, SEO targeted the right audience with keyword optimization and intelligent content implementation that led to the right demographic finding the right sites to buy products from.
What really made SEO stand out as a marketing tool, however, was not just how well it performed when compared to other types of advertising, but how self-perpetuating those results could be. With traditional marketing, your best results will be discussed by word of mouth. People may talk about a commercial that they have seen, and with online video sites now can even send others those commercials. Viral marketing campaigns have tried to utilize what SEO has been doing for years beforehand on the internet; when customers click on links to your sites, that acts as an endorsement for your site to the search engine. Likewise, when customers and users, as well as SEO sites and blogs, mention your website, that too will increase the ranking of your site on a search engine. The result is that your site will be more visible to the search engine, which will get you more traffic, and the cycle will continue so long as you continue to sell good products or deliver good service to your customers.
