If you are conducting SEO (search engine optimization) work on a website, internal factors are aspects that you have complete control over. SEO factors of this type include…

Keywords: Both keyword density in the text and words listed in the META keyword tags are internal factors which help determine which search queries will cause pages to appear in results. They should be words people actually search for frequently.

Redundancy: If different pages on a website are too similar to each other, they might receive a poorer ranking in search results. This also sometimes applies to duplicate content it shares with other websites, such as press releases which have appeared elsewhere.

Navigation: Search engine “robots” or “spiders” should be able to navigate the website and index each page. Animated javascript menus may look nice, but are often impossible for “spiders” to access. A text based Site Map is useful for providing easy navigation to all internal pages.

Updates: Adding new information or updating existing data on a webpage is another internal factor which has the potential to boost its rankings. It also makes the page more likely to be added to directories and/or linked to by other websites, providing additional SEO benefits.

Description: The description META tag determines (with some exceptions) what appears below the title in search results, as well as some website directories. This is not as essential as some of the other internal SEO factors, but should at least be added to the major pages of a site.

Titles: To be suited for SEO purposes, the webpage titles should be appealing for searchers to click on, and clearly differentiate each page. Among other factors you should consider the title’s length; part may be cut off in search results if it is too long.

Links: It can be detrimental for SEO efforts to add internal links to websites which have been removed/downgraded in search results for using objectionable promotion techniques (like “doorway pages”), or to openly sell links to other sites (unless the “nofollow” tag/attribute is used).

URLs: Combined with other internal factors, putting relevant keywords in the webpage file names and/or domain name can be helpful in SEO work. Search engines cannot recognize unseparated words; dashes are generally recommended more than underscores for separating multiple words in a URL.

Correctly and thoroughly optimizing internal SEO factors will potentially help improve the external factors affecting a website as well, such as the number of inbound links.

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