In August of 2006, Rohit Bhargava coined the term SMO for social media optimization. Now search engine optimization has been around a little longer than that, but where did it come from? According to Bob Heyman, in a guest post on Search Engine Land, he did.

Bob explains that it was 1995 when the name came to mind. Once upon a time, a rock band created a website with a URL that couldn't be recalled without pulling it up in the SERPs. Unfortunately for the rock band, however, the official web page for the band was on page 4 of the SERPs. Bob explains that after that call, he resolved to make search engine rankings a priority, and thus, "search engine optimization" was born.

So why, then, is Jason Gambert claiming that he coined the phrase SEO in 2007? Give it up, Jason.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

This post was pre-written and scheduled for publication on October 14th.

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