Tweaking or adjusting some important factors in your website can dramatically increase your search engine rankings and traffic. However, lots of internet entrepreneurs overlook, underestimate or ignore the power of on-page search engine optimization. As a result, they are not able to maximize the results that they can get from increased organic web traffic.

A popular misconception about on-page search engine optimization is that it is a difficult and extremely technical thing to do. However, the truth is that the concept or principle behind it is much simpler than it really is. The following tips and step-by-step guidelines will help you adjust on-page website factors to dramatically improve your organic traffic:

1.    Strategically place industry competitive keywords in your page title and meta tags. This requires you to include the keywords you want to rank for within the page title of your website. In the page title alone, it is possible for you to target at least three to five keyword phrases. However, you should be wary of repeating the keyword phrases too often. Avoid repeating individual words more than once or twice, as it will look like spam to the search engines.

The meta tags section of your website is where you should place a longer list of keywords that you want to rank for in the search engines. Make sure that the keywords you list in this section are relevant to the content of your website.

2.    Create a sitemap. A sitemap is a separate page that lists down all the links and pages that your website has. The links and pages are arranged in hierarchical order and clearly show which page links to the next. Creating a sitemap is extremely important if you want to increase your online rankings because search engines crawl this to determine the structure of your site and internal linking factors. Sites with a better structure and clearer hierarchy of webpages tend to have higher search engine rankings than those who do not have any sitemap at all.

3.    Make your navigation bar links keyword-rich and SEO friendly. Instead of using common words in your navigation bar such as “Home”, “About Us”, or “Contact Us”, try to include your keywords. For example if you are in the weight loss niche, try navigation bar headings such as “Weight Loss Home”, “About Our Weight Loss Team”, or “Contact A Dieting Expert”. On the other hand, try not to overdo this as it may be bad for your rankings and traffic if done in a spammy way. Another good strategy would be to use generic, common terms within the home page, then use keyword rich navigation bar titles on your site’s subpages.

4.    Let keywords occur naturally in your website copy. In the past, SEO practitioners simply included their targeted keyword phrases repeatedly within the body of their website content in order to optimize their sites for the search engines. Today, this method does not work as effectively as before. What you should do to get the search engines to love you is to let your keyword phrases occur naturally within your site’s sentences and paragraphs. Sometimes the individual words of a keyword phrase must be spread out and diluted all throughout the sentences and paragraphs to make it all look more natural.

Adjusting important elements within your website may seem a bit difficult at first, but its long term results are worth it. Constantly tweaking your site, or outsourcing the task to an on-page SEO professional, is well worth the time, money and effort you invest because you’ll get much more targeted traffic in the long run.