Internal SEO.

Purpose

The purpose of internal SEO is to optimize your web pages for ranking well in organic SERP. However without performing additional external SEO, you should know that no matter how well you optimize your website internally, you will not rank in the first pages for highly competitive keywords. With internal SEO you will rank higher on less competitive terms searches compared with search results with no internal SEO at all.

Internal SEO requires modifications of your web pages, so you need to be familiar with the web development technologies used to develop your website or you can ask someone who knows how to do these modifications. In case your website is still in the development phase, make sure that the programmers team follows the search engine optimization rules presented.

Internal SEO focuses on the following areas of a website / webpage:

Web Page Content

Content is (still) king. Original, rich content is the search engines' robots preferred "food". It's logical that if you want to rank high in SERP for specific keywords you need to have relevant content for those keywords. But forget about search engines robots! The main reason you should have interesting content is your visitors; the robots will not buy your products and read your articles and they will not link back to your website from other websites. Your visitors will do that! So, your SEO efforts regarding content should focus on:

• Page Titles - The title of a webpage should be relevant to page's content. Don't use the same title for all your website pages;
• META Tags - These are HTML tags used in "the past" to provide information about the web pages. Google and other search engines disregard them, but there are a few search engines that still use them in ranking the pages. And with search engines continuously changing their algorithms, you never know when they might become important again. The most important meta tags SEO wise are: name="keywords" and name="description";
• Format Tags - The text format tags like (bold, italic, h1, h2, h3) are used for titles, sub-titles or to highlight a word or an idea. Search engines know this and add more weight to those words or phrases;
• ALT Tags for Images - For an image, the ALT tag represents a description of that image that will appear in case the image source is no longer available or the visitor is using a text-only web browser (i.e. Lynx). Provide a description for all the images on your web pages;
• Keywords Density - Write original content, but make sure you have a good keywords density. The recommended average keyword density is 3-5%. Remember to count singular and plural versions as the same word. Start by writing for your visitors and edit the text afterwards so that it has the right keywords density. If you can not manage to get your keywords in, then they might not be the right keywords for your web page;
• Links Neighborhood - Some search engine weight the text surrounding a link with greater importance so links inside the paragraphs are more relevant than, let's say, links in the footer navigation of the page.

Accessibility

With the robots.txt file you can prevent the robots from indexing specific files or whole directories. However, the name of the game now is: "find and crawl my page". So, your web pages should be accessible, easy to find and easy to crawl. As the links are the gateways to the web pages, most of the SEO efforts will concentrate on the links:

• Accessibility - Pages that are accessible only after you login or that require a session ID or pages that are accessible if you select an option from a drop down menu or enter a term in a search box may not be indexed;
• Dynamic links - Although the search engines are improving their crawling robots to read dynamic pages, static pages are "preferred" to dynamic ones. Robots may be reluctant in crawling links with two or more parameters
  (i.e. http://www.mydomain.com/page.php?categ=10&id=2&name=%video%cds% );
• Deep Links - Pages buried more than 3 links from the main page are often ignored unless the site is very popular;
• Links Density - Links in excess of 100 per page are usually not crawled;
• Links Name - The actual name of the link is also important as anchor text helps tell the spiders what the linked-to page is about. Use your keywords as anchor text when linking internally;
• Internal linking - Refers to the number and importance of internal links pointing to a specific page; internal links can really drive a page but use this wisely. If every page links to every page, the "strength" of the links is diluted;
• Outbound links - will help the engines understand what the web page is about. Link to relevant, quality websites;
• Clean Code - It is becoming more important to have valid HTML and CSS code. It will make the life "easier' for spiders and it will make your pages load faster for your visitors;
• Sitemap - The crawlers usually start from the website's homepage. If a web page is not accessible from the homepage, a sitemap (accessible from the homepage), with links to all of the pages, will help your website getting indexed.

So optimizing the title, the keywords, the description, the links structure and the contents is your first step in achieving higher ranking in SERP. The next step, and the most difficult one is the "external" SEO.