… continued

This is part II of Internal SEO (I)

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

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.