Search Engine Friendly vs Search Engine Optimized

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Search Engine Friendly Vs Search Engine Optimized

By Joost de Valk
Expert Author
Article Date: 2007-06-15

This discussion has been around for ages, but here in the Netherlands, more and more webdesign companies are claiming they can do proper SEO.

Now I'm not arguing that a lot of the work SEO's have to do sometimes, is caused by webdesigners who don't know what the hell they're doing.

It's a good thing that knowledge about search engine friendly webdesign is becoming more and more widespread, and it's a good thing that webdesign companies are finally understanding that there's some things they've been doing wrong for ages.

Joe Dolson has a great post about Search Engine Friendly not being the same as Search Engine Optimized, and I totally agree with him.

As an SEO, I spent way too much time making sites search engine friendly, thus preventing crawl issues, making sure all pages in a site can be indexed, and making sure that the title of a page describes the content of that page.

That's the work a proper webdesigner could have saved me from doing.

Now once all that and more is done, once the site is search engine friendly, an SEO can start optimizing for the search engines…

Optimization means trying, looking at the competition, adapting, and seeing what the results of your changes are. Optimization is in the litte stuff…

Optimization is moving that word to the front of the title to make your rankings a bit better. Optimization is stuff like this:

An example, the header of the new design for css3.info looks like this:

<div id="header">

    	<h1><a href="http://www.css3.info">CSS3.info</a></h1>

    	<h2>Everything <em>you</em> need to know about CSS3</h2>

</div>

However, on subpages, this h1/h2 does not really reflect the value of those sentences for that specific page… So on subpages, I made it look like this:

<div id="header">

    	<h3><a href="http://www.css3.info">CSS3.info</a></h3>

    	<h4>Everything <em>you</em> need to know about CSS3</h4>

</div>

Now that is optimization in my eyes… So search engine friendliness and search engine optimization are not the same thing, the first is a pre-requisite for the latter, nothing more, nothing less.

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About the Author:
Joost de Valk is an SEO from Nijmegen, the Netherlands, who works for Onetomarket, an online marketing company. He has experience as a sales manager for several IT companies, is involved in open source projects like WebKit and Mozilla, and is the creator of the biggest online resource on CSS3. Joost blogs about web design and SEO, and writes all sorts of scripts for webmasters.