Digital Marketing Class

There was a time, now long forgotten, when things were unimaginably different then they are today. When Netflix only dealt with CD's, Blockbuster was booming, and accessing the internet required a blood sacrifice in the form of Dial Up connection. It was a time where websites could take up to 5 minutes to load, only to turn out to be some disappointing phony filled with low quality stop motion videos made out of cutout photos of Snoop Dogg. These crude dark ages, unimaginable to the culturally blessed people of modern day, were the Wild West days of the Internet. No rules, no laws, no regulations - it was survival of the fittest.

Chaos ruled as parties scrambled to catch up with this technology, giving way to many, many dumpster fires. But alas, in 2004, after breaking a partnership with a now relic of the past called Yahoo, a savior burst from the heavens in angelic fire: Google.

And so begins the story of what came to be - what we now take for granted - SEO. One could argue that this feature, along with its various companions, single-handedly shaped the internet from the utter fiasco it once was to the elegant, refined version it is today.

As broadband providers started popping up like hungry scavengers looking for a piece of the pie (before the biggest, scummiest one of all jumped in the mix *cough* Comcast *cough*), and internet became more and more standardized, Google began to make sense out of this manic world the internet had become.

Well, to make sense of it is to put it lightly. It would be more accurate to say that it confronted the senseless craziness the internet boasted, and simply jammed it all into one space, kind of like taking a couple pounds of mashed potatoes and trying to fit them neatly on a bookshelf. You do your best, cut your loses, avoid talking about it on your resume, and keep moving forward. However, what it did do incredibly successfully was creating a set of parameters and rules  by which to organize the mashed potatoes, which although seemed a little strange at fist, turned out to be one of the most fine-tuned structures to have ever been invented. These rules and parameters dealt with things like tossing all the bad mashed potatoes out of the pile, organizing them in ascending quality, and some other things which, to be frank, utterly surpass the capacity of this already mediocre metaphor.

But, as you can imagine, one of those was Search Engine Optimization! SEO, even in its infancy, was a key player in development of the internet. If the internet used to be the Wild West, then SEO was the new Sheriff in town, and it was played by a hybrid of Clint Eastwood and Chuck Norris. Not only did it kick major bad guy butt, but it seriously improved the quality of search engines to the point of heightening what was possible on the Internet. What was once the equivalent of vine compilations on Youtube eventually became a platform intrinsic to human culture across commerce, entertainment, education, and a plethora of other categories.

And, as the Internet grew, so did SEO. What SEO is at its core is a staggering amount of algorithms, constantly being built upon and updated. That isn't the most consumer-friendly language, so think about it as our Clint Eastwood/Chuck Norris protagonist going through training arc after training arc with martial arts masters, legendary cowboys, deities,and so on, continuously increasing his power and capacity to rule. Even today, it is said that he is somewhere in the Himalayan mountains, becoming one with nature and attuning himself to the whispers of the wind and ocean.