JAYA algorithm is one a recently developed meta-heuristic algorithm that does not require algorithm-specific parameters. It is an algorithm based on the fact that the solutions always go towards the best when searching. This paper proposes a JAYA variant (JAYA-SIP) with three improvements to the Original JAYA algorithm. It has incorporated the senior learning strategy, the incremental population strategy, and Powell's local search method into JAYA. The improvements were tested with IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC) benchmark set for 30 and 50 dimensions, and the benchmark functions set from a special issue of the Soft Computing journal (SOCO) for 500 and 1000 dimensions. In addition to benchmark sets, the performance of JAYA-SIP was evaluated with nine CEC 2011 real-world test functions. The results of the proposed algorithm are compared with JAYA variants and some meta-heuristic algorithms. According to the results of the experiment and the analysis, the proposed improvements increased the performance of the JAYA algorithm. JAYA-SIP achieved better results than the other algorithms it was compared with.