Building an SEO Strategy Before Google Ruled Search

In 1999, there was no single search engine to optimize for. AltaVista, Excite, Infoseek, Lycos and HotBot each ran their own crawler and their own ranking rules. Yahoo was still mostly a human-edited directory, and a fast-growing newcomer called Google was starting to earn a following for giving people results that matched what they typed. Building a strategy meant working with that fragmented landscape rather than chasing one algorithm.

Here is a workable build order for a business starting today.

1. Write pages around the words a customer would type. Most engines in 1999 still leaned heavily on the words in your title tag, your body copy and your meta tags. Before touching any code, list the handful of phrases a real customer would type into a search box to find what you sell, then make sure those phrases appear naturally in your page titles and opening paragraphs.

2. Get your HTML in order. Use a clear <title> tag on every page, a meta description that reads like real ad copy and a meta keywords tag with the honest, relevant terms for that page (some engines still read it, so it costs little to include). Avoid frames and heavy Java applets for anything you want indexed. Many crawlers in 1999 still struggle to read frame-based navigation or plugin-driven content, which can mean the crawler sees nothing worth ranking.

3. Submit by hand, engine by engine. There is no shortcut yet. Submit your URL directly to AltaVista, Excite, HotBot, Lycos, Infoseek and Google. Apply separately to the Yahoo directory and to the Open Directory Project, since a listing there can also feed smaller directories that pull from it. Expect submission-to-indexing to take anywhere from a few days to a couple of months, and don’t resubmit obsessively; most engines penalize or ignore repeat submissions of the same URL within days of each other.

4. Build a simple, crawlable site structure. A flat structure, with a real HTML sitemap page linking to every important page, gives crawlers an easy path through your site. This matters more than any trick, because a page a crawler can’t reach can’t rank anywhere.

5. Start earning links the old-fashioned way. Reciprocal link pages, industry directories and mentions on related sites all help, both for the direct traffic and because engines like Google are beginning to treat inbound links as a signal of a page’s importance, not just its keyword match. This is worth paying attention to now, because it’s a new idea in ranking and it rewards sites that build real relationships rather than just repeating keywords.

6. Track what’s working with server logs. Referrer logs from your web host will tell you which engines are sending visitors and which keywords they searched. Most businesses in 1999 don’t have anything fancier than raw log files, but reading them weekly is enough to tell you where to put more effort.

7. Resist the shortcuts. Keyword stuffing (repeating a term dozens of times, often in tiny or white-on-white text) and submitting the same page under slightly different URLs to game submission limits are both increasingly likely to get a page dropped from an index rather than ranked higher. Engines are getting better at spotting manipulation, and the sites that will still be visible a year from now are the ones with real, readable content.

None of this is exotic. It’s mostly good housekeeping: clear pages, honest tags, patient manual submission and a habit of reading your logs. What’s changing is the introduction of link-based ranking, which rewards businesses that build genuine relevance rather than just repeating a phrase enough times to trip a filter.