Whenever people think about ways to drive traffic to a website, the next thing that usually comes to mind is building back links. This is very important, not only because search engines and web directories place great importance on it, but also because they are sources of direct traffic to your site. However, concentrating on building back links alone will not give you enough competitive advantage. You also have to do what is called on-site SEO.

Before we proceed further, I want to let you know that your success here lies on how you do your keyword research. But there is no space to accommodate keyword research in this article. Nevertheless, get this one into your head first. The resource box below will fill the void. Now let's continue.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and it involves optimizing your webpages so that they rank high for specific keywords in your niche. When you build back links you are doing off-site SEO, but when you tweak your webpages to make them search-engine friendly, you are doing on-site SEO. Neglecting the later can compromise your search engine ranking.

If you ignore on-site SEO most of your competitors will definitely outrank you. Now you've known the importance of on-site SEO, let's now see how you can really do it.

Meta tags:

We are going to focus on only two meta elements: the meta keywords and meta description. They appear within the head tag of your document. These tags once helped search engines to know what a page is all about but due to misuse, some search engines now neglect them, but they are still important.

The meta keywords should contain the major keywords on that page while the meta description is where you describe what the page is all about. It should be short, attention grabbing and should contain your major keywords.

Title and Heading Tags:

Many people misuse the title and heading tags without knowing that search engines pay special attention to them. Between the title tags is where you put the title of a webpage. Make sure you include your major keywords in the title.

The heading tags range from h1 to h6 with h1 being the largest. This tags help search engines to understand the hierarchy of your page and they also place importance on keywords between these tags. So use your keywords between the heading tags.

Some people avoid using the heading tags because of their very large font-sizes. This would not be a problem if you know your CSS. You can quickly overcome this by using relative sizing. Set the body font-size to 1em and size other elements relative to that. You can give the h1 a font-size of 1.1em, h3 a font-size of .8em, h6 a font-size of .9em and so on.

Keyword Location:

The location of your keywords is also important in SEO. Always place your primary keywords in the first paragraph of your content. Search engines will place more importance on keywords at such location than on keywords that are further down.

Anchor text

Don't link to different pages in your site with words like click here or get it here. Use your keywords in anchor texts so that you can rank high in search engines for those keywords. This rule also applies when you're building back links.

Sitemap

Sitemap is a page that contains links to all the pages in your site. Sitemap helps search engines to crawl every page in your site. It also help your visitors to see the overall structure of your website.

Sitemap can increase your page rank because search engines take internal linking into account. The more pages search engines see in your website, the higher your page rank.

You can easily create a sitemap using free services like xml-sitemaps.com. How to do this is straightforward. It is as simple as entering your main website URL and clicking on a button.

After creating the site map (HTML sitemap), save and upload it to your root folder (http_docs or public_html). Link to the sitemap from every page on your site. The ideal place to put such link is at the footer.

Submit an XML version of the sitemap to Google if you have a Google webmaster account. If you don't have one get it at google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/siteoverview.

These simple on-site optimization tips can go a long way to boost your website ranking. Combine it with off-site optimization and your traffic will sky-rocket. Like I said before, the heart of all these lies on keyword research, follow the link below to get free information on keyword research.