A lot of people know to concentrate on keywords and SEO but tend to put all their efforts into external linking and optimization without putting much time and energy into internal optimization. This article will look at four simple ways to achieve peak internal optimization within your site:

(1) Have Your Top Posts Featured in the Sidebar: Keeping your most popular posts displayed helps you in two ways. Firstly it highlights your best content for new visitors to the site and secondly it gives you site-wide links to the very best posts and the strongest posts, which in turn makes them stronger still in the eyes of the search engines. This will then improve the rankings of those posts. You can make this change to your site very simply, by introducing plugins like ‘Post Views’ or ‘Popularity Contest’. To get the optimum results, male sure your list is right at the top of your sidebar.

(2) Place a List of Relevant and Related Posts after a Post: As with the first suggestion this is another excellent technique for bringing down your site’s bounce rate and getting your readers to stay onsite and browse further into your content. It is also a good way to link automatically between related posts, which will improve your website’s standing as an authority niche.

(3) Show Incoming Search Terms: This is an easy but strong method of improving natural rankings on any broad search keywords, without you needing to do hardly anything. If you list any incoming search terms on each one of your site’s posts (with each term back linking to the post) then those targeted internal links are then going to automatically boost your search position for long-tail keywords. This will of course then boost traffic and improve your ranking. One note of caution – never have too many internal links in a post as it will cause adverse search engine results.

(4) Fill in the Meta Details: This is obvious but many people neglect to do it properly. Meta information is no longer as relevant to ranking well in search engines but it is still useful. It will only take you a few minutes to add meta descriptions and meta keywords as well as image alt tags when you create a post, but the effort is worth it. To make it easier still, get hold of the popular All In One SEO plugin.

Alex is a marketing and SEO expert. He blogs regularly about all things SEO and maintains a blog on freelancing for the Bedouin Group .