Throwback Thursday: Altavista Search Engine, Circa 1996

Back in 1996, I was spending my spare time (early mornings and evenings) trying to rank web pages that I built in raw html code. There were no WYSIWYG editors out there, or at least I didn’t have access to any. I created websites using notepad and html code. And it worked really, really well. It wasn’t that difficult to get your web page ranked in most of the search engines, as long as you had a good title tag, meta tags, and the right content on the page.

One of the search engines that drove a lot of traffic back then was Altavista. Here’s Altavista back in October 1996.

They even had very rudimentary caption contests, and you won a CD if you had the best caption! Woo Hoo! A CD!

Were you doing SEO back in 1996? What was your favorite search engine?