The first website was launched in 1991, and the term search engine optimization (SEO) had quickly surfaced by 1997. It was easy for companies to see early on that additional steps must be taken to drive traffic to newly created websites. Simply creating and launching the sites would not be enough.
Google SEO gained significant momentum by 2000, after Yahoo and Google partnered up. This partnership allowed Google to power Yahoo’s organic results. At the time, Google was not known by many people, and the partnership with Yahoo allowed Google to grow into the most influential search engine on the planet.