These two terms sound a lot alike, but mean different things to a search engine when it comes to your website.
First off, it’s important to understand that search engines will find your website no matter what. Their army of crawlers will eventually try to index your website and you will get onto their radar sooner or later. Depending on your websites SE Friendliness, and it’s overall optimization, the crawler will index all of your pages and then determine where your site should rank.
Search Engine Friendly (SEF)
To explain this, think of “search engine friendly” as a butler. This SEF butler is very polite and acts as a guide to the first-time crawler, and will open doors so that all pages are accessible. Search engine friendliness isn’t just one magical ingredient. It is actually a long list that includes everything from meta tags and page titles to how the website is actually coded. Making sure that there are no errors on you website that can stop a crawler is one of the main things that make your site search engine friendly.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is actually a methodology to help your website get higher rankings in the search engines. As mentioned above, without SEO your website will rank as long as the crawlers can find their way through. But SEO can actively improve your site’s rank through strategic use of content, keywords, and link-building. Staying with our analogy, if SEF is a butler clearing the way for the crawler, then SEO is the party.
Each page of your website is like a mini-party for the crawler. Once on your page, the crawler will feast on content and mingle with links, both inbound and outbound. If your meta tags, keywords, links and content were satisfying and relevant, your website will rank higher than a site that did not offer as much “fun” for the crawler.
Before You Optimize
Before your website can be optimized, it must first be search engine friendly. This will ensure that all doors are open for the crawlers. If your site is not SEF, then optimization is a waste of time and money. Before you higher an SEO firm, make sure they include steps to make your site as friendly to the search engines as possible.
Leave a Reply