Internal SEO optimization

Internal SEO means - optimization you could do on your website (internally) to improve the search engines indexing and also to score better in search engines listings. There are many ways to improve your website Google score so let me teach you the most important variables that will have the greatest impact on your internal SEO.

Page title

Page titles are extremely important if you want to do great internal SEO optimization for your website. Every page should have the most relevant title, according to the keywords and key phrases you are aiming to get best score with. For example if I am writing an article (like I currently do :)) for Internal SEO optimization then the title should be “Internal SEO optimization” and everything else should go behind the title. Let’s say you want to include your domain name in the title of every page – and this is fine - just use a format like

 < title >”Title of your article/page” | “yourdomainname or  your website name”< /title >

Keywords in URL

It really depends on your content management system but it is much preferred if your url is like:

xyz.com/your-post-title 

than

xyz.com/7283/index.php?someparameters

Page description tag

Having proper description into meta tag “description” is important because on Google listings your description will appear after the title of your page. If possible try to have different “description” tag for every single page. This will improve your internal SEO optimization a lot.

Page keywords tag

Although they lost most (some claims all) of their initial strengths it is still ok to have meta tag “keywords” to put all important keywords and key phrases in it. Avoid placing more than 20 keywords though.

Assignment of H1 tag

H1 tags were massively used in blogs and they really give you some advantage. So either configure your system to put page title in H1 tag automatically or manually enter the most significant keywords/key phrases in it for every page you have. You could also have H2 as a style in your editor and mark some of the sub-titles as H2. But in my experience using H1 tags is just enough and H2 tags are simply overkill when doing proper internal SEO optimization.

Relevant page content

This one is extremely important. Obviously if you write about “internal SEO optimization” on your page you want to repeat this key phrase at least several times on the page. Do not overuse this but have your most important keywords and key phrases (related to the article/page) at least 5-10 times on every article/page.

Each page reachable by text link

Each one of your pages should be reachable by text link (with proper keywords/key phrases on the link). You should not have pages reachable only by clicking over images for example.

Sitemap

The sitemap is extremely useful Internal SEO optimization tool. It is a page/or xml containing all your links/pages in your entire website. No matter how big your website is you should really consider having proper sitemap. Upload it in Google Web Master Tools to ensure that Google-bot visited and indexed all your pages.

Internal linking

Now this is very important to have for the proper internal SEO of your web site. Ideally you should have as many links as possible from and to your web pages/articles. Every link to a single page is like “vote” or “like” for this particular page and improves the page score. Again, do not overuse this but consider having at least “related articles” on every page/article of your website.

These are the most important issues you should be familiar when you want to do great internal SEO optimization. There are several more things you might consider after you are done with those, like:
- Not having one page reachable by two or more different URLS.
- alt/titles tags of images and links to be relevant to your keywords/key phrases.
- To not have session ID or similar in the URL.