It became mainstream much later in the progression since it became more of an art and science mix than it used to be. The Secret Warrior Forums used it back in about 1994, but I doubt they have archives since it’s so many years later and now it’s “The Warriors” Alan Says may know.

Craig Miller
internet marketing specialist

ha thanks!

It’s funny that I get into this “research” because of a little “tag” saying “citation needed”, which was added to the Wikipedia article for Bruce Clay where it used to claim that he coined the term. Well, that claim was removed from the article. That is how it should work in Wikipedia… it often does, but unfortunately does not just as much.

It’s a bit sad to see that so far, the earliest occurrence found (by Danny) is a spam message in Dec. 1997, to Usenet so characteristic of so many of the subsequent “SEO companies” (not all of course). In the flaming promo, the spammer actually spells one of the search engines’ names (Magellan) incorrectly. :(

Lots of other forum discussions on this, including High Rankings, who are particularly hot on the trail. I should have known MMG’ers were probably behind some of this, but it took awhile before the term “stuck”. I seem to recall it naturally spread from firm to firm offering remarkably similar services, and it stuck because it sounded technical to clients, IMHO.
http://www.highrankings.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=26193&st=45

Keep in mind, also, the fact that Webposition was already selling its product in 1998, and the term “positioning” got a huge boost from that.

It would have taken some convincing by someone influential to argue that *positioning* was misleading. My memory tells me Danny might have been that influencer — not to say he was the first to use the term SE optimization, but that he endorsed its use.

Then again, I almost suspect some journalist came up with the term, in a hastily written article in some major publication, and others began adopting it. Kind of like a genetic mutation where the person stuck in a term they felt was better than “positioning,” and it fit well with what the strategic actors in the space thought would sound better to clients, so the thing stuck.

Or, some now defunct SEO firm decided to sell using this term. Or it was a secondary term sometimes used by the likes of i-prospect, and then it spread to many copycat sales pitches. Or, Bruce Clay really was the first – and again, it spread like wildfire (accelerated by Danny’s usage of the term?).

It doesn’t seem that the term was used in 1996 or before that – if you search for “optimizing for Altavista” or “Optimizing for Webcrawler” or “Optimizing for Infoseek” you don’t get any results from their heydays.

Unfortunately the Wayback Machine is down right now so I’m thwarted on that front.

It’s amazing how entrenched the acronym “SEO” became. I get called one sometimes, and I hate it. :)