So you have started a new blog? Looking to improve the traffic on your site? I am sure someone must have told to hire a SEO specialist to improve your page ranking. You don’t have a budget to spend on SEO? No worries!! It’s not a rocket science, it’s an art and as rightly said by Matt Cutts, people have unnecessarily complicated things when it comes to search engine optimisation.

So What you need to do differently to achieve SEO

Here are some basic tips to keep in mind whenever you write an article.

1: Write some cool contents – Now you will say that is obvious!!! But there is a difference. Try to write articles keeping your target audience in mind. Don’t try to increase the number of posts on your site just for the heck of it. Even if you succeed in SEO and generate more traffic to your site but if there are no quality articles on your site, you wont have any returning visitors. Some really cool contents will help you retain visitors to your site.

2: Update frequently – The frequency with which you post articles to your site does matter. Make sure you regularly post articles on your blog at somewhat fixed interval. Don’t be in a hurry to upload all the articles you have got in one go. Typically when you start a new site, you tend to upload more articles and the frequency reduces later on. Have patience and try to upload articles at regular interval.

3: Speed of your Site – Yes!! Speed does matter. You can tell that from your personal experience. If you visit a site that takes ages to load, will you prefer to stay on that site?? I guess no one will and hence Google has introduced a check for loading time in the page ranking algorithms.

4: Avoid excessive ads – Don’t go berserk by putting ads all over the place. Try to keep less than 4 ads per post/page. More than 5 ads on single page gives an impression that it is a spam site and contains no quality contents. This check is present in page ranking algorithm of Google. So beware!!!

5: Site Navigation – Try to keep site navigation simple and ensure that people can easily go through different sections of your site. Try to create a sitemap and submit to search engine. That helps a lot. No harm in displaying your site map in your footer. It makes a difference and adds to SEO.

6: Keywords – Choose your keywords correctly and don’t go over the board by stuffing all possible keywords per post. Whatever keyword you specify in the meta data, make sure that exists in your content. Else it will be marked as spam by search engine.

7: Internal Links – Don’t underestimate the power of internal links. Wherever applicable try to link you existing related posts. Its a good way to keep your reader engaged on your site. Also it helps in transferring PR juice from one page to another.

8: External Links – Try to visit your competitors blogs or blogs in similar domain. Try to get links from them to your site. Guest blogging is one of the way to get links to your site. Write good articles for their site and get a backlink to your site. Getting a backlink from high authoritative site helps tremendously to improve your site ranking.

9: Social Media – Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, MySpace, Orkut, Technorati. There are plenty more available out there. It is a good way to market your site among your followers and increase traffic to your site.

Still reading??? Great!!! I hope that has helped you in same way or other.