Greenlight, a UK-based SEO and PPC consulting firm, recently published an interesting article about the history and evolution of SEO.

Briefly, we can say that there are 5 major steps in terms of SEO.

1. SEO began with search engine submission in the early days due to the fact that search engines had limited crawling capabilities.
2. Then, it turned into on-page SEO, meaning the art of ensuring a website is technically accessible to search engines and relevant to the targeted keywords.
3. Since Google – which quickly became the major search engine from 2000 – introduced its notion of PageRank, the acquisition of quality back links the dominant factor in the early years of the decade.
4. In order to face link spam, Google algorithm began to take into account contextual information of a backlink and especially its  anchor text.
5. In the same logic, the notion of TrustRank appears meaning that the more a backlink comes from a trusted sources  the more it is valuable. Domain authority mainly came from the age of the domain name.
6. Link context became more and more important mainly because link exchanges. Google started to consider that the placement of links on a page and, more importantly, the context of the page and the site the link is on is of utmost importance .
7. Additionnaly, user signals – such as click through rates, bounce rates and search patterns – became to be taken into account by search engines to assess the level of trust search engines have in a site.
8. Finally, major search engines – among which Google is the more advanced – decided to include multimedia and real-time content to match better user’s needs.

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A couple of weeks ago, Matt Cutts and his team did an SEO web audit session at Google I/O 2010 consisting into a technical review of different websites from a SEO point of view. It is worth to look at:
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For those being not herborists, taraxacum is a genus of plants in the family Asteraceae. A number of species of Taraxacum are regarded as seed dispersed weeds. After pollination is finished, the dandelion flower dries out  and then the seed-bearing parachutes expand and lift out of the dried flower head.

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Today, Friday 28 May 28, I participated at a TechTalk organized by Google Belgium featuring Matt Cutts. I must confess that – as a SEO consultant – I felt like a child before meeting Father Christmas. Gregory Janssens -  another Brussels-based SEO expert, as well as other professionals, both from the private sector – SEO agencies, media, etc.. – and from the public sector – the European institutions in particular – were also present.

I will not comment on the content of this conference, where I didn’t learn so much about SEO.  I would rather concentrate on aspects a bit more anecdotal, such as Google offices in Brussels or meeting with Matt Cutts.

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On which criteria choosing an SEO Consultant? Outsourcing this strategic aspect of your eMarketing can bring very good results under the condition that you manage to build an effective relationship between your IT department and the choosen SEO consultant.

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Google search engine ranking factors are among the most important elements to check in any SEO consulting. Doing this regularly should ensure that the strategies implemented are optimal. If deficiencies are found regarding the performances of a website, a SEO consultant would normally try to improve it in three core areas:

• Optimizing the architecture to ensure the website is crawled and indexed by search engines
• Optimizing the content to ensure the website includes the right keywords at the right places
• Optimizing the incoming links to ensure the website receive quality incoming links from relevant domains

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If you are a SEO consultant, you are probably caring about this issue. After having been observing the multiples changes of the algorithm of Google, and especially the universal search, the personnalized search and the real-time search, I came to the conclusion that it will become increasingly hard to monopolize key positions ad vitam aeternam.

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Along the years, Google Inc. has acquired many companies with the goal to provide an integrated solution which could eventually be a substitute to the Internet itself. Indeed, Google Inc. doesn’t only provide search-related services but it provides a whole integrated environment in which the Internet user is more and more captive. I can’t even name an Internet service or product where Google Inc. is not as the forefront. I guess that when every Internet user will have a Google account, this will mean with the complete domination of the Internet by Google.Inc.

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While White Hat SEO techniques aim at optimizing a website with respect to search engines guidelines, Black Hat SEO seeks to bypass these rules in order to reach a quicker and most effective visibility.

White Hat SEO

As a SEO consultant in Brussels, I only White Hat SEO techniques to help my client increase their presence and visibility on the Internet. These techniques provide long-lasting qualified traffic on your website.

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Providing SEO (Search Engine Optimization) services is generally quite a tough job. Not only because is a complex discipline as it itself but also because you often have to spend most of your time explaining what is SEO to your client and how he can benefit from it.
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