IT’S 35 years since the release of the IBM PC, the first PC that justified widespread use, in 1981. Thanks to the prolific growth of PCs through the 80s, when Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989 there was a large ready market of devices that could browse the web. But it wasn’t until 1993 that NCSA Mosaic, a browser that could display images inline, was launched and the web began its explosive growth on personal computers. 1993 was also the year that I founded SilverDisc. In 1994 we got our first web server and started building websites for clients.
IT’S 35 years since the release of the IBM PC, the first PC that justified widespread use, in 1981. Thanks to the prolific growth of PCs through the 80s, when Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989 there was a large ready market of devices that could browse the web. But it wasn’t until 1993 that NCSA Mosaic, a browser that could display images inline, was launched and the web began its explosive growth on personal computers. 1993 was also the year that I founded SilverDisc. In 1994 we got our first web server and started building websites for clients. In 1995, with the launch of an internet search engine called Alta Vista (you may remember it) we realised the potential for marketing our clients through building websites that were attractive to search engines as well as people – a process now known as SEO, or search engine optimisation. In the late 90s we patented some internet search technologies and also took note of a new type of search engine. Goto.com, launched in 1998, was the first Pay-Per-Click (PPC) search engine. Later acquired by Overture which was later still acquired by Yahoo, Goto.com’s auction-based PPC system lies at the heart of today’s Google AdWords and Bing Ads PPC engines. SilverDisc’s own first forays into PPC marketing were in 2001 with Overture. Google AdWords, although it existed, was very small scale and it did not even become a PPC engine until 2002. It’s hard to believe, 15 years later, that AdWords drives most of Google’s 74.5 billion dollar annual revenues. In the early 2000s, the SEO industry was suffering from a very poor reputation with lots of spam and deception taking place. Through my patents, I was invited to talk on SEO best practices at search marketing conference around the world. At a conference in San Francisco in 2001, Google were in the audience and invited me to work with them on their Webmaster Guidelines. As a result, I contributed two guidelines which are still there today. These days the SEO industry is much better, in part thanks to the work we did back then, but sad to say there are still a lot of charlatans about. The future for SEO, PPC and the PC? Mobile! The phone in your pocket in 2016 is the new personal computer, thousands of times more powerful than the desktop PCs of the past. For more information, contact Silverdisc on 01536 316100 or visit the website www.silverdisc.co.uk