Autobiography of The SEO Flea

First, i'd like to give a little backgrounder about this specific topic which is "portal sites" or web portals that i would like to discuss in this post. I just came across this word just the other day and my curiosity led me to an umimaginably existing portal site that has so many pages in them. Could you guess what is the name of the site that has lived since the 1990's existence? i'll just discuss about his portal site later in this post. Some portal sites would even contain up to ten thousand pages and it made me wonder if such existence is really possible. I have not really seen any kind of portal site before this research enabled me on the knowledge but my interest made me wonder how one operates in the web.

I looked it up in the wiki and i saw this specific definition "A Web portal is a site on the World Wide Web that typically provides personalized capabilities to its visitors, providing a pathway to other content. It is designed to use distributed applications, different numbers and types of middleware and hardware to provide services from a number of different sources. In addition, business portals are designed to share collaboration in workplaces. A further business-driven requirement of portals is that the content be able to work on multiple platforms such as personal computers, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and cell phones."

I have stumbled upon the existence of web portals just the other day as what they call it in the early 90's before the existence of the dot coms. At first i couldn't believe that they existed according to the spammer who e- mailed me about using portals to earn a significant amount of income through marketing and from using them. Problem is, when i tried to look for links leading to the great information that the spammer said the site promised, i cannot find any of it and on details of how i could use the idea of building a web portal.

Tried to do a little research on the matter and i found out that they do exist after all hoping that this time, curiosity won't kill the cat. Surprised at what i found out, according to WIKI, these portals existed during the days where the development of the early web browsers were still on the way. Web portals in general as to my own opinion are one of the most user-friendly type of sites in the early days of the web. These web portals do cater to the undying needs of its visitors as to relevant-content-rich pages that somehow is designed to make the users and visitors stay at a longer time fraction of their web browsing. These types of sites would you belive used to have up to 10 thousand or more pages to offer to their visitors and these pages have each a unique content in relation to the other pages.

What interests me most is that one of the most popular portal sites during those early 90's era of the world wide web is still existing now and is still giving relevant content rich pages that makes the user (us) stay for a long time. Guessed what site it is? Just click the link to find out.

Portal sites like -----, provide personalized capabilities that gives the user the advantage of viewing the different pages without going away from the mother URL or domain and providing access to the contents therein that are relevant to a user's search and query in the early days and this serves as their browsers as the equivalent to IE or Google or Firefox today.

Development of Web Portals:

These web portals were the most wanted place in the internet for marketers that are after of the portion of the traffic which enables them to earn income from. Such examples are America Online who used the Netscape Netcenter, the Walt Disney Company who used the Go.com and AT&T who used the Excite. In the early times, big network companies such as the CBS ( Columbia Bradcasting System ), popularly known in the early 90's also to be one of the biggest bradcasting companies in the United States is targeting Lycos also a popular portal site.

These portal sites (Lycos, Altavista, Infoseek, Hotbot, and Excite) at first started as either directories or search engines. Due to growing needs to expand their services and to make the users stay for a while more than the ususal, they were able to conceptualize and come up with strategies to lengthen the stay of users by providing what we now enjoy as free e-mails, chatrooms, messengers, games and news thereby increasing revenues and potential visitors and customers to market their services and products.

These portal sites died down in its overwhelming climax in marketing era when the technology of companies that are so called as the dot-coms came in the picture before the end of 2000. Currently there are many other types of portals that has emerged out of the bankrupted ones and the most successful that has been left to stand out successfully is Yahoo.

The dot-coms are according to WIKI -> " The period was marked by the founding (and in many cases, spectacular failure) of a group of new Internet-based companies commonly referred to as dot-coms. A combination of rapidly increasing stock prices, individual speculation in stocks, and widely available venture capital created an exuberant environment in which many of these businesses dismissed standard business models, focusing on increasing market share at the expense of the bottom line. " These dot-com companies is where we actually owe our tech situation these days because they were the ones that revolutionized and maximized the internet capability of great marketers.