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 web2list.cn looks like this:
<h1><a href="http://www.web2list.cn”>web2.0</a></h1>
<h2>Everything" <em>you</em> need to know about web2.0</h2>
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:
<h3><a href=”http://www.web2list.cn”>web2.0</a></h3>
<h4>Everything <em>you</em> need to know about web2.0</h4>
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.
