Search Engine Optimization vs Search Engine Friendliness
A clear picture of the difference between Search Engine Optimized Website and Search Engine Friendly Website.
Amongst all the acronyms that exist in this web development world, the most misused terms are SEO and SEF. One of the questions that is thrown mostly during website development is: “Will the website be Search Engine Optimized? ”. This prompts me to give the reply as “No, it will be Search Engine Friendly”. Both these terms might sound similar but have a whole lot of difference between them.
So, let’s go through the differences between SEO and SEF.
SEF (Search Engine Friendly) is one time; to be done only at the time of development. A website development should be done following these guidelines of SEF:
1.Using the correct URL structure:
URL readability is very important.
“www.cdnsj07.mydomain.com/d/1SVcAGYvuFUVJ0ZqWHbeRM-Vx06olbahSWzKk2LliHvw/edit#gid=0”
This kind of a url is junk. The URL should be more human readable avoiding parameters like “gid=0”.
“https://www.infiflex.com/giffy-can-help-you-unlock-your-exponential-potential-in-enterprise-world”
This is an SEO Friendly URL structure
2. Maintaining the HTML coding structure:
The hierarchy of heading tags is an important aspect of developing a Search Engine Friendly website. The Heading tags are actually the official way to identify the key sections of a web page. They make the rest of the content easily readable.
The whole website should be W3C verified including the iframes used.
3. Using image alt tags:
Alt tags are text alternatives for images for the search engine. So it is a must to use alt tags for images in the website.
4. Usage of title tags:
<head>
<title>Example Title</title>
</head>
Missing out the title tag while developing any web-page is a huge disadvantage to gain clicks on the page. It is from where readers get an idea about the whole page.
The structuring should be:
Primary Keyword - Secondary Keyword | Brand Name
5. Implementing canonical tags to prevent duplicate content:
Although duplicate content is not exactly a penalty, it might cause less visitors to the site. It is not always intentionally created duplicate content. So keeping this in mind web developers should include the rel=canonical attribute which tells the search engine that the specified page should be treated as a copy of the specified URL.
6. Adding breadcrumbs to inner pages of the website
Breadcrumbs increase the navigation of any website. So breadcrumbs are a must for any website.
7. Implementing Sitemap:
Sitemap improves web crawling. It helps search engines to crawl to respective web contents easily.
8. Implementing Robot.txt
Robots blocks all crawling that should be indexed.
On the contrary SEO(Search Engine Optimization) is a long term process. It requires the following steps:
-
Using the correct URL pattern:
The content authors should write the URL only in lowercase separated by hyphens. The URLs should also match the title tags in the webpage.
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Optimizing the Description tags and Title tags to gain clicks for the website:
To optimize the title and description tags it should be kept in mind not to exceed 60 characters for title and 180 characters for description. Also, frequent usage of keywords is not right. The brand name should be given importance in the title and the first word should be a keyword.
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Mapping keywords for the content and optimizing the contents for ranking:
Keyword mapping is one of the important and an ongoing process that can be changed from time to time by analysing the clicks and visits to the website.
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Creating a Blog which has no duplicate content at all:
Creating a blog is one of the easiest and most successful ways for increasing the ranking of a website as it can engage readers. People would love to visit your website for more information. So taking advantage of it the brand name can be easily exposed to the corresponding industry in the digital world.
In one sentence the SEO process is not limited to a specific number of days. It has to be continued and is a long process to gain the proper result.
To get your website optimized to a noticeable google ranking contact Infiflex Technologies Pvt Ltd.
