Apart from that old fellow in the Amazon rain forest who was found dead recently, there cannot be anyone else in the world who doesn’t know what Google is. Today, Google and SEO go hand in hand in some respects, because if you want to get to the first page of Google you need to understand SEO (“search engine optimization”).
Or if you don’t understand how to operate it and use it, then you need someone who does, like me.
But Google goes way back. It was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin back on September 4th, 1998. You might think that it is a strange name. After all, what does it mean?
It is actually based on a very large number. You might think that 100,000,000 is a large number, and it is. It is the digit 1 followed by eight zeros.
A googol – which is where the name came from – is the digit 1 followed by ONE HUNDRED zeros! How long would it take you to count a googol of matchsticks, or peas, or cherries?
But Brin and Page were inventing names for search engines as far back as 1996 when they were at Stanford, and the name that they initially came up with was BackRub. They called it this because the program analyzed the web’s “back links” to understand how important a website was, and what other sites it related to. And it ran on Stanford’s servers until it got to the point where it took up too much bandwidth.
But by 1997 they decided that the name wasn’t good, and they were kicking ideas around when another student named Sean Anderson came up with “googolplex” which is the digit 1 followed by a googol of zeros! Page decided that “googol.com” was best and Anderson searched to see if the domain name was available but accidentally typed in “google.com”. Page decided that was even better and he registered it on September 15th, 1997.
A 25th Birthday Celebration?
So, is it time for the 25th birthday celebration for SEO? Because, if you want free advertising on Google, you have to be able to use SEO, as I said just now.
However, if you don’t understand it – and that’s fair enough, because there is nothing straightforward about it, and for that matter most people don’t “get” it – then you can hand all of the donkey work over to me.
Let me refine your website, produce content (Google loves fresh content), and get your business to the point where Google loves you so much that you are on page 1.
Did you know that only 10% of searchers ever go on to page 2?
Page 1 is where you need to be.
