This article is a short fun fact nostalgic look at when the very first website was published on the internet and when SEO marketing began.

  1. The website and when it all began – 21 years ago, the first website Info.cern.ch in August 1991 ever published went live. It was dedicated to World Wide Web information, and remains online decades later.
  2. What about www.? – English scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989. He wrote the first web browser in 1990 while employed at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland. The browser was released outside CERN to other research institutions starting in January 1991, and then to the general public in August 1991.
  3. Internet went live – On 6 August 1991, the World Wide Web went live to the world. There was no fanfare in the global press. In fact, most people around the world didn’t even know what the Internet was.
  4. Internet Popularity – The internet is the world’s most popular computer network. It began as an academic research project in 1969, and became a global commercial network in the 1990s. Today it is used by more than 2 billion people around the world.
  5. SEO beginning – The first recorded usage of the acronym “SEO” is dated back to  1997. So, it seems like we’ve had the term around for more than 22 years as of this writing. Of course, that actually predates the creation of Google and many of the other search engines that we depend upon today.
  6. SEO introduced  – It is believed that SEO was born in 1991. Around this time, the world’s first website was launched, and one quickly turned into many as websites crowded the internet.
  7. The Google rise – Activity began to explode in 2000, when Google became the client search engine for one of the Web’s most popular sites, Yahoo!. By 2004, when Yahoo! dispensed with  Google’s services, users were searching on Google 200 million times a day.
  8. SEO Changes past 10 years – The rise of content. First, there’s the rise of content marketing as part of a successful SEO strategy. Google has steadily refined what it considers to be “good” content over the years, but it was the Panda update in 2011 that served as the death blow to spam content and keyword stuffing.
  9. SEO founders – 1963. SEO (Sponsors for Educational Opportunity) was founded by investment banking consultant,  Michael Osheowitz, as a mentoring program to help underserved students gain admission to competitive colleges and universities.
  10. Before Google – We Used  Yahoo, Lycos, or AltaVista for Search. Before Google became synonymous with looking things up on the Internet, Yahoo, which first indexed the web, was the number two most popular site online.