Search Engine Friendly (SEF) & Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): The Difference

What is Search Engine Friendly?

SEF is the process of making your website “friendly” to search engines such as Google.

What you read about SEO in popular and mainstream tutorials is usually referring to this. Good practices such as clean mark-up, ordered content, title tags under 65 characters, the use of meta tags and so forth are SEF practices as they make your site easier to index, more accessible and generally more benign. SEF, in general, refers more to the technical aspects and development of your site than SEO.

SEF is a part of optimising your site as it goes hand-in-hand with SEO but it’s important to draw the line between the two to avoid confusion. A good professional designer and/or developer will naturally, or with a bit of effort, design and develop sites with SEF in mind.

What is Search Engine Optimisation?

SEO, in a nutshell, is all about keywords. Finding the right keywords, that are not only relevant (extremely important), but that you can also compete in, can be a massive task depending on the size of the website and the competitiveness of the target market.

In order to understand the importance of getting keywords right, do a search in Google for “Website Design” and then for “Web Design”. They are treated as unique variables and may have a significant difference in searches and results making one more valuable to use then the other. Performing well in one search, and not the other, could have a positive effect in terms of traffic (and vice-versa).

There are many variations of words that Google and other dominant search engines take into consideration such as “car rentals” and “car rental”. SEO is all about researching keywords to find gaps or areas that a site can perform well in and enhance quality visits.

There is a vast array of things to take into consideration and the majority of SEO, generally, consists of quality keyword research and quality link building. During the process of professional SEO, in which research and building can take weeks/months, the build up of spreadsheets, statistics and data is crucial. Not only can it be important for the client to see (SEO is a very “non-visible” practice and takes time to make an effect) but it is vital for drawing a plan. The actual implementation of SEO is fairly minimal in comparison but the research and planning phases aim to make a significant difference for Search Engine results.

As SEO can be very time consuming and is often not done thoroughly it’s difficult for non-professionals to actually understand what SEO is. Hopefully by reading this the differences between SEF and SEO has been easier to grasp.