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.

To be continued …

No matter if your website is an informational one or if it’s an online store to sell your products, you want people to come and visit it. Without visitors your information remains unknown and your products remain unsold. So, you need some sort of advertising in order to attract customers and visitors. A great deal of the web traffic you get is driven by the three major search engines: Google, Yahoo and MSN, because entering search queries in the search engines is a primary method of navigation for most of the Internet users. So it’s obvious that it is desired to have your website coming up in the search engine results pages (SERP).

With millions of websites out there, users usually check the first couple of results pages, so it’s important that your website is listed in those pages. You can do that by “buying” yourself a place in the sponsored links area or, showing up for free, through “organic” results. SEO, short for Search Engine Optimization is a collection of techniques and practices that will make your website show up in the first page(s) of organic SERP.

The objective of SEO

As in any other endeavor you need to have defined goals and objectives; because if you don’t know where you’re going, how do you know you got there? The goal for SEO is to rank in the first page(s) of the SERP for specific keywords with the final objective to bring in web traffic. So, the first step in obtaining good rankings is keywords researc. Effective keyword research is at the core of your SEO efforts can mean the difference between your success and failure.

The SEO – Internet Marketing relationship

SEO is a part of your overall web marketing efforts. It is an efficient tool to get you quality traffic, but to convert that traffic into sales it depends on how clear your marketing message is (“sale” here is used as a broad term for a product sale, a subscription, a quote, etc). To improve conversion rates, first you must analyze the traffic you’re getting, to see what type of visitors come to your website, traffic sources and which pages are the most and the least successful. This way you will know what needs (or needs not) to be changed on the pages and how your visitors are entering and leaving your website.

Think of SEO as the goal and the Internet marketing as the objective. Goals are general directions that are not specific enough to be measured (i.e. get better ranking, get more web traffic, etc.) while objectives are specific and measurable. They are concise, you can measure them (i.e. get $10,000 in product sales, get at least 200 subscribers to your newsletter, etc.)

In conclusion, SEO is the goal through which you can reach your web marketing objectives.

Additional reading:

• Understanding SEO
• Internal SEO
• External SEO