So you’ve started a new blog? Looking to improve traffic to your site? I’m sure someone must have told you to hire an SEO specialist to improve your page ranking. Don’t have a budget to spend on SEO? Without worries!! It’s not rocket science, it’s an art, and as Matt Cutts rightly said, people have unnecessarily complicated things when it comes to search engine optimization.

So what should you do differently to achieve SEO?

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

1: Write interesting content – Now you will say that it is obvious!!! But there is a difference. Try to write articles with 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 are successful in SEO and drive more traffic to your site, but if there are no quality articles on your site, you will not have return visitors. Some really great content will help you retain visitors to your site.

2: Update frequently – How often you post articles to your site does matter. Make sure you regularly post articles to your blog at somewhat fixed intervals. Don’t be in a hurry to load all the items you have at once. Usually when you start a new site you tend to load more articles and the frequency is reduced later on. Please be patient and try to upload items at regular intervals.

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

4: Avoid excessive ads – Don’t go crazy putting ads everywhere. Try to keep less than 4 ads per post/page. More than 5 ads on a single page gives the impression that it is a spam site and does not contain quality content. This verification is present in Google’s page ranking algorithm. So be careful!!!

5: Website Navigation – Try to keep your site navigation simple and make sure people can easily navigate the different sections of your site. Try creating a sitemap and submitting it to the search engine. That helps a lot. It doesn’t hurt to display your sitemap in your footer. Make a difference and add to SEO.

6: Keywords – Choose your keywords correctly and don’t overdo it by filling in all possible keywords per post. Regardless of the keyword you specify in the metadata, make sure it exists in your content. Otherwise, it will be marked as spam by the search engine.

7: Internal Links – Don’t underestimate the power of internal links. Whenever applicable, try linking to your existing related posts. It’s a good way to keep your reader interested in your site. It also helps in transferring PR juice from one page to another.

8: External Links – Try visiting your competitors’ blogs or blogs on a similar domain. Try to get links from them to your site. Guest blogging is one of the ways to get links to your site. Write good articles for your site and get a backlink to your site. Getting a backlink from a high authority site helps tremendously in improving your site’s ranking.

9: Social Networks – Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, MySpace, Orkut, Technorati. There are many more available out there. It’s a great way to market your site to your followers and increase traffic to your site.

Keep reading??? Excellent!!! I hope I have helped you in the same way or another.