What is Search Engine Optimized vs. Search Engine Friendly Website?

SEO is over populated industry that has a lot of firms and programmers that don’t have a clue.

Here is a little brief on SEO vs. SEF.

Good URL structure is search engine optimization.  A great example of this:

www.example.com/category/product-name/

A poor example of search engine friendliness would be:

www.example.com/IWCatProductPage.process?
Merchant_Id=1&Section_Id=691&Product_Id=1439522&
Parent_Id=302&default_color=BLACK&sort_by=&sectioncolor=&
sectionsize=

Look at your CMS Content Management System and make sure that it is not stopping you from the following:

• ·      Handle canonicalization issues
• ·      Rewrite URLs
• ·      Add breadcrumbs
• ·      Change headers
• ·      Optimize images

Make sure that your CMS is not running cloacking system.  One way to check is  the website robots.txt file.  Type the website domain, followed by robots.txt (e.g., www.example.com/robots.txt).  If you see that they are disallowing (from the search engines) basically “everything” on the domain, there’s a good chance they they are doing “good” clocking, and sing one of these systems.

More important elements to SEO are:

• ·      Content
• ·      Information Architecture/Keyword Mapping
• ·      Blog Posts/Tips and Advice

If you would like to read more detail about SEO vs SEF please read Mark Jackson’s full article at SearchEngineWatch.