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 css3.info looks like this:
<div id="header"> <h1><a href="http://www.css3.info">CSS3.info</a></h1> <h2>Everything <em>you</em> need to know about CSS3</h2> </div>
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:
<div id="header"> <h3><a href="http://www.css3.info">CSS3.info</a></h3> <h4>Everything <em>you</em> need to know about CSS3</h4> </div>
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.
Search engine friendlyness is a basis that needs to be taught to all site builders. Search engine optimization is and should remain the field of us experts. Most of our Dutch SEO colleagues see the first as their main task and too bad that is necessary. Hopefully things will change in the near future and Search Engine Optimization becomes Optimization again.
I hope so too Peter... I'll try to teach every webdeveloper I meet about Search Engine Friendliness, if we all do, we can stop doing Search Engine Friendliness and start optimizing ;)
Hey there,
Yes, that is optimization already - actually optimization is really about paying details to things like these... those HTML headers, making sure that you have proper meta descriptions, alternate tags for images etc.
I've not seen a discussion between "search engine friendly" and "search engine optimized" though - I always thought we "Optimize a page to make it search engine friendly" :P
i think the results shows you it works right ;)
I think your example is also not optimization. The h1 should be the main title of the page, so a homepage is always different from a subpage. A webdeveloper should know this (and some actually do!).
Writing good titles is also just making things correct and friendly. But things like internal link structure, content creation, external link strategy, that's what an SEO should be doing the whole day.
But indeed, the textbook SEO what you spend most time on when doing SEO in The Netherlands :| And the saddest thing is, in most sectors, this is enough to rank well.
@Ruben: true, it sucks, but it's true :)
These days the SEFriendly modifications are being built into most common CMSs as standard, hopefully we'll start to see the SEOptimized features start to creep in shortly!
Hi
This is a great article. Thanks for the information.
Well well well...
I'm glad I found this post.
I was starting to get pretty pissed at everything and everyone.
I'm a web developer fresh out from school and the thing is, no one ever said to me that when people talk about SEO they don't mean "what the words are saying". They mean some other thing. I'm pretty mad because I've been bouncing all around the place looking for "guidelines" and things to change on how I (and my team) make our websites.
All I kept finding when looking to "optimize" my sites for search engines are "schemes" and other "elaborate" intrigues and systems to manipulate page ranking and get the "#1 page ranking on this and that term"...
What all of you (yes I'm taking this a bit personal) that refer to SEO actually mean INTERNET MARKETING and / or LINK BUILDING and other stuff I could care less about (at least for now).
So I guess I was looking at the wrong place, I need to be searching for "SEF"... what the ****... Search Engine Friendly. Ohhhhhhhhk I'll go along with that.
There are a couple of things you guys pointed out here in the comments. So I'll ask this then, if SEO (your term, actually Internet Marketing) is not SEO (my term, you think of it as making pal with search engines and drinking tea with them, read "SEF"), then how do you call SEO (making chums with search engines) and where can we (the evil ignorant web developers) find such information. (Whenever we search for SEO we find spam campaigns...)
Sorry if I sound pissed a bit, I am, but don't take it personally, I'll get over it pretty fast.
Seb
Ohh and by the way, not everyone uses commercial CMS and websites are not only blogs, there are still a couple of "old school" sites out there, so it's still a bit by hand since the content is so custom...
"A good developer can do that job well, but mostly they do it to function for the user, not perform for the search engines". - I agree completely with this statement. Web designers must take into account that optimising a website is a lengthy process. Just because your developed site has pages structured to comply with Google's standards, does not necessary mean you have taken everything into account. Preparing optimisation, you should take into consideration what keywords and titles will benefit your finalised site so that Google can filter through all of this information, hopefully resulting in a better page rank and increased traffic.
Joost, I went through a few of your pages and didn't see an h1 being used. I was going through it to verify the way I set up wordpress blogs. Most themes do what you mention above by using the h1 tag as the name of the site or main keyword on the home and every subsequent page and say that it's the correct way to do it for seo, that's just plain wrong. The way I explain it to designers is to look at it as a book, would you want the main title of each page to be the introduction title? The way I set up wordpress is to use an h4 tag for the logo and use the h1 2 h3 for the content and remove the text link "home" and replace it with a home icon image. Love to get your thoughts on this Joost since I didn't see you use the h1 on the pages I looked at so was just wondering, thanks.