How To Carry Out An Internal Site Optimization: Diving Into Details

Successful promotion of any site requires high-quality semantics. We use semantics for:

It is necessary to conduct a thorough analysis of keywords to collect a relevant semantic core. This is the only way you can find search queries for effective optimization. You shouldn't start working on optimization without a proper semantic core (unless you can conduct a technical audit and fix errors on the site).

When I compiled a rating of SEO agencies, I found a pair to show as the example: the first agency is old, expensive, and well-known (let's call it D&G), the second is young and less known (for example, Zara). Both agencies are in the top 10, but D&G ranks much better. Domain age, backlinks, even website quality - everything works in favor of D&G. But the most curious thing is that D&G has as much traffic as Zara. What's the secret? Zara has more keywords, and they are better worked out: higher average CPC and lower difficulty.

You can use 2 methods to collect a high-quality semantic core:

For good ranking and high-quality optimization, you need to set up the linking. You need internal linking to distribute the weight on the site and give the promoted pages more weight. Most often, linking is set from pages you don't promote to pages you do promote.

Internal links are links within the same site (when a page from one domain links to a page of the same domain). External links connect pages from different domains. In terms of SEO, they have significant differences. The backlink affects page ranking as a whole (the weight) as well as the link anchor (the link factor).
The link factor is the influence of the text (anchor) of a link to positions on requests close to the link text.

Page weight (static weight, Page Rank) is the influence of the link on the positions for all requests. The page weight doesn't depend on the search query. Therefore, it is called static. If the text of the page is not relevant to the query, the weight itself cannot bring the page to the top. Otherwise, for all queries, the main page of Wikipedia or Google would be ranked first.

Internal links don't provide link ranking. They carry weight, that is, anchors (texts) of internal links are not necessary. Although, what is taken into account:

However, the relevance of the anchors to search queries is not essential. Users must click on the link (or make Google think so).

I haven't heard about any filters or sanctions of search engines for internal links. The relevance of linked pages is hardly accounted for internal links. For external links, this option helps Google filter out purchased links, but internal links are never bought. Although, indirectly, through behavioral factors, the relevance of the link can affect the weight it transfers.

In general, forget what you know about external links when arranging internal links. The point of optimizing internal links is to increase the weight of the pages you need. Link texts and page relevance are not important for internal links.

This algorithm helped Google become one of the largest companies in the world from a small startup. Before Google, only page text was taken into account; it was possible to reach the first position after working on the text.

With the advent of link and behavioral factors and domain age accounting, the role of weight has declined. But still, the page weight is one of the essential ranking factors.

The PageRank algorithm considers the expected number of page visits with the following calculations:

From the point of view of the page:

You can calculate the limit of this geometric progression:

Thus, the page transfers 5-6 times more weight than it had.
Now let's move on to the arrangement of internal links during optimization:

This formula can calculate the total weight of your site:

Where p is the proportion of internal links on the pages: the ratio of correct internal links to the total number of links. Examples of invalid links:

That is, the weight of the site depends on 3 parameters:

No linking schemes will increase the total weight of the site.
If we take the base weight of the site for 1, we get the following graph:

As you can see, external and broken links significantly reduce the weight of the site. To avoid this:

Unchanged, this algorithm is hardly used so far:

Search engines have dozens of ranking factors, so there may be several weights. For example, some SEO experts believe that page depth (the number of clicks from the home page) is important. But in this case, sites with a large number of links on the pages would win. Using the same algorithm, you can get a more advanced analog of the nesting level. Suppose, give the main page the initial weight = 1, the remaining =, 0 and count Page Rank.

However, I doubt that other algorithms are used that are fundamentally different from PageRank since the calculation of PageRank is very well suited for calculating large, constantly changing data.

The weight transferred by links with this attribute goes nowhere. Previously, SEO specialists used this tag too often to redistribute the weight on their website - this indirectly confirms the effectiveness of weight distribution.

In terms of weight, this is just a broken link. This helps combat SEO spammers in the comments: they don't need to add nofollow links. Internal links are best avoided with this attribute.

H1 is the main page header. Unlike <title>, users see it. You should use only one H1 tag per page.

In most online stores, the H1 category page matches the category name. Let's say you have a category "sneakers" on your site. You get the most traffic for queries that contain the words "men" or "women". And if you don't have separate pages "men's sneakers" and "women's sneakers," then it is worth making H1 "Men's and women's sneakers."

At the bottom of the product category page, online stores place texts for SEO purposes. In most cases, this text is of poor quality. Users, of course, rarely read it, but search engines can check punctuation and text quality. You shouldn't save money for pages that generate a lot of income, so order a high-quality SEO text.
Such text shouldn't be displayed on the second page of the category so that search engines don't consider it as a part of the site template or filter the site for duplicate content.

You can check the quality of the text on the page using Serpstat Text Analytics tool. Read more:

The total weight of the site is essential as well as how you distribute this weight across the site. Weight is a limited resource, and it is necessary to spread it correctly.

Pages that can potentially bring in a lot of traffic need more weight than pages that cannot. For example, a page with contact information is in the site menu and therefore receives a lot of weight, but doesn't bring traffic.

Let's suppose:

If we take half the weight from 800 pages and give it to the 200 best pages:

And in the end, we increased traffic by 2.5 times - from 1000 to 2500.

Perhaps you need to remove some internal links from the site template. The effect of this is 5 times lower than if the link would be external, since our pages transfer up to 85% of their weight to other pages of the site.

You need to link more to pages that can potentially bring more traffic. Depending on the situation, you can figure out how to organically fit them into your site. You can find them with Top Pages report at Serpstat. Enter your domain into the form below:

If the primary traffic is brought to you by blog articles or product pages, then you need to:

You should perform a detailed site check before starting the work on site's SEO. It will help to find minor issues and severe problems so that the optimizer can safely work on other ranking factors and promote the site.

An audit is often carried out when the site is under the sanctions of search engines: positions decrease, and traffic drops sharply. In this case, an audit allows you to find errors, fix them, and return to the previous position.

You also need an SEO audit when everything is fine with the site: traffic is growing, and positions are gradually increasing. You can further speed up the growth of the website by identifying and correcting technical issues.

Even if you don't have errors right now, this doesn't mean that they will not appear. To prevent their occurrence, set up a permanent audit.

Also, check some site pages in the html validator. You need to check one page of each type, for example:

That's how you can find problems in the site template.

If the site is large, then it is better to start with the optimization of the template. Remove irrelevant text from it and try to shorten the texts. You can also hide some text using the noindex tag.

Load modal dialogs (pop-ups) through AJAX, or try to show search engines as much as possible that this is a modal dialogue:

First, you need to determine which words are the most common in your key phrases. For example: buy, reviews, prices. You need to check what keywords are already on your site or find subqueries of several of your keywords.

You can do it using Serpstat. Just enter a keyword or domain into this form:

These words should be added to the title, for example: "Samsung laptops: buy, reviews, prices." In copyright, you can add the country, city, and category of your organization.

The recommended title length is 70 characters, and the word order is essential. Therefore, the name of the organization (if present in the title) should be at the end. Alt tags and image file names strongly affect image search and organic display.

According to the Pareto principle, 20% of the work will bring you 80% of the result. Although, in this case, the ratio is usually even stronger: somewhere around 5% to 95%. Therefore, it is crucial to prioritize your work. First, you need to collect pages, the optimization of which can bring a lot of traffic.

You can do this in two ways:

One of the most fundamental behavioral factors is the click rate in the search engine results. CTR is the ratio of the number of clicks on your snippet to the number of its impressions. The more attractive your snippet is, the better it is ranked. Therefore, if you double the CTR of your ad, then traffic will more than double:

Therefore, the snippet is essential. Usually, it is formed from:

You can also examine competitor snippets and featured snippets.

This concludes my guide to internal site optimization. What tricks do you use? Write in the comments under the article;)