When it comes to doing business online, you will soon discover that it’s all about the traffic.

Traffic, or the number of internet users you’d be able to generate for your website, is and will always be the lifeblood of any online venture. After all, what good is a website when there’s no one there to see its pages? How successful will your digital products be if no one would be able to know about them? Who will avail of your services when no one will get exposed to their existence?

Contrary to what many people believe, generating traffic for your website does not start once you pages are published and have gone live. Traffic generation strategies start at the very moment you are conceptualizing an idea for the website itself.

This is what on page search engine optimization (SEO) is all about. It is concerned with techniques that you could implement on your web pages themselves to ensure a good volume of traffic for your website. 80% of your traffic would come from the many search engines. If each and every web page you have is optimized for these search engines, then your website would be in a good position to have a high rank for the results of every relevant query.

Keyword selection.

Picking the right keywords can make or break your website’s success. Think of keywords as the exact phrases people type into Google when they’re looking for something — your job is to figure out what those phrases are.

Instead of stuffing random words onto your page, focus on using the ones your ideal visitors are actually searching for. A few smartly placed, well-chosen keywords can do way more for your visibility than cramming in a bunch that don’t fit.

If you’re not sure where to start, try using free tools like Google Keyword Planner, Ubersuggest, or AnswerThePublic. These tools show you what people are searching for, how often, and how competitive each keyword is. Look for a sweet spot — words with decent search volume but not too much competition.

Pro tip: mix in a few long-tail keywords (those 3- to 5-word phrases). They might not get as many searches, but they usually attract visitors who are ready to take action.

Keyword placement in content.
Content is the king of the internet. But even royalty needs support. Populate your content with the proper amount of keywords. A density level of at least 2% should be sought. This means that the right keywords should be mentioned at least twice for every 100 words of text.

META tags.
META tags are HTML codes that do not have a bearing on the physical appearance of your web pages, but they do inform the search engine spiders that such web pages are appropriate for a particular query. Always include the following META tags on the top portion of your source code. You could copy-paste them from the list below, but do change the indicated fields. Also, make sure that you include your keywords as much as you could on your META tags.

<META NAME=”Author” CONTENT=”your name here”>
<META NAME=”Subject” CONTENT=”the subject of your site”>
<META NAME=”Description” CONTENT=”description of your site”>
<META NAME=”Keywords” CONTENT=”your keywords here”>
<META NAME=”Revisit-after” CONTENT=”14 days”>
<META NAME=”Rating” CONTENT=”General”>
<META NAME=”Robots” CONTENT=”All”>

ALT tags.
ALT tags refer to the text that would appear every time the mouse cursor would pass through an image. Your ALT tags should include your keywords.

Page titles.
Page titles are the captions that appear at the very top of your web page. Make sure that each web page in your website would have a different title that will include the appropriate keywords.

Focus.
Remember, search engines will crawl through your website per page. Each page is a different project altogether. Focus is the key. Ensure that each web page of yours would focus on a particular keyword or key phrase. If there is an article in that page, make sure that the article will only discuss and include one keyword or key phrase from the list you have made.

Keyword in URL
It will greatly help if you would name the page file in a manner that would include the keyword or key phrase it is focused on. For example, www.thisisyourwebsite.com/thisisyourkeyword.html is a good page filename that would help boost your SEO efforts.

Following these guidelines would help you a lot in securing a favorable position in search engine results pages. This in turn would guarantee for you a sustainable and sufficient volume of traffic that would make your website a genuine success.