If you work in digital marketing, then you most likely know the importance of search engine optimization (SEO).
But perhaps like other people, you also tend to confuse a search engine optimized website with a search engine-friendly one.
“Wait, what? You mean there’s a difference between a search engine-friendly and a search engine optimized website?”
Perhaps that’s what’s going through your mind right now.
Maybe you’re even wondering, “What’s the difference, and why does it matter, anyway?”
Okay, first things first.
YES, there is a difference between the two.
Any comprehensive local SEO guide will show you that there are several differences.
In many cases, people who think they’ve designed a search engine optimized website just search engine-friendly one.
Note that the optimization process is different both in scope and scale and when you learn what the differences are, it will be easier to understand why it’s important for you to differentiate one from the other.
One-and-Done vs. Ongoing Process
Creating a search engine-friendly website is pretty much a one-time deal.
Once you’ve succeeded in the task, there isn’t much you need to do, except perhaps tweak it from time to time.
You may think of it as the first step towards making sure your website does well in search results—building a solid foundation for search, so to speak.
Search engine optimized, on the other hand, is an ongoing process that constantly evolves.
There are new keywords for you to target all the time, more links for you to get, fresh content for you to publish, and more traffic to gain.
Just because you’ve achieved top rankings for particular keywords doesn’t mean you can stop all SEO efforts because if you do, there’s a good chance that other websites will take your place in the rankings.
The day will never come when you get to say your work in SEO is done.
Difference in Focus
The people in charge of making a website search engine-friendly are mainly web developers.
Their focus is on making sure nothing prevents search engines from finding and indexing the website’s content.
Therefore, they are mainly concerned with the website’s construction and coding.
Search engine optimized, on the other hand, is the responsibility of SEO professionals whose main focus is the messaging.
They make sure the content on the site is engaging, fresh, and properly targeted.
On Handling Content
Simply put, making sure each page on your website has unique content and is easy to understand isn’t enough to fully optimize your site.
These efforts mainly make your website more user-friendly and easier for search engines to navigate.
Similarly, crafting unique and well-written titles and descriptions doesn’t fully optimize your site either; it just makes it more search engine-friendly.
To truly optimize your site, you need to conduct keyword research and competitive analysis. This helps you identify which keywords, titles, and descriptions will boost your rankings and attract more visitors.
Additionally, tracking user behavior is crucial. It allows you to understand what content your target audience prefers and finds engaging, helping you tailor your site to their preferences.
On Navigation Paths and URLs
In simple terms, when you make it easy for search engines to follow the paths through your website, ensuring important pages get indexed, your site becomes search engine-friendly.
But if you also design your site to guide visitors toward your goals, like more sales or sign-ups, then your site is properly optimized.
You might have also made sure your website URLs are clear and easy to read. This not only helps search engines understand them but also makes them understandable to people.
You might have heard that it’s important for people to understand what a URL means just by looking at it. If you’ve done this, your URLs are search engine-friendly.
To make your URLs even better for search engines, you can align them with your website’s navigation. This can improve how they appear in search results and boost the chances of people clicking on them.
On Duplicate Content
Have you ever used canonical tags or no index tags to avoid duplicate content issues?
If so, you might have thought you were optimizing your site for search engines. But actually, those are just temporary fixes. They make your site search engine-friendly by telling search engines to ignore duplicated content.
For real optimization, you need to go further than just guiding search engine crawlers to the right content.
The best SEO practice is to get rid of all duplicate content completely.
By doing this, you ensure you’ll never run into issues with duplicate content and you won’t have to rely on quick fixes to manage it.
Following Search Algorithm Guidelines
In the world of digital marketing, you know there are many rules from search engines to follow if you want to succeed in search.
The good news is, that most of these rules are pretty straightforward and already well-known.
But sticking to these rules just makes your website easy for search engines to handle, not fully optimized.
To truly optimize your site for search, you’ve got to think beyond what the search engine people are saying today.
You need to predict where search engines are headed in the future.
Stay ahead of the game by anticipating what changes search engines might make next.
Instead of trying to find shortcuts to get top rankings, focus on consistently giving value to your site visitors.
Working on One vs. the Other
Yes, it is important to distinguish the things that make a website search engine-friendly from those that make it search engine optimized.
By making such a distinction, you ensure the accomplishment of all your search goals for your site. But does this mean you need to focus on one and forego the other?
No, it doesn’t.
What it means is that you need to understand how you can work on both for the benefit of your site and your business.
For one thing, you need to understand that developing a search engine-friendly website, while far from being synonymous with having a properly optimized site, is the first step towards getting your website search engine optimized.
Most SEO professionals would probably tell you that you need to spend a considerable amount of time and effort ensuring that your website is search engine-friendly before you can focus on the optimization process.
Remember what we said earlier?
Developing a search engine-friendly website means building a solid foundation for search whereas search engine optimization is an ongoing process that keeps you on top of search.
Instead of asking which one you need to focus on, therefore, you need to find ways of using both to your advantage.
Conclusion
There is a lot that goes into the process of search engine optimization.
Getting to the top of search rankings isn’t something you can accomplish overnight.
But if, right from the get-go, you make sure the website you build is a search engine-friendly one, you’ll be saving yourself a lot of time, money, and effort because then you won’t have to check what you’ve missed and go back to step one.
If you’ve already built your website, that’s fine.
There’s no use worrying about what you may have done wrong.
You just need to check your site and implement the necessary adjustments.
If you’re still in the process of getting your website up and running, then it will be a good idea to keep the above discussion in mind and strive to make your site search engine-friendly so that optimizing it will become a lot easier.