So you have a blog, you have awesome content and still no one is coming. What’s up with that? In this update I’m going to give away 4 of the best SEO tips that you won’t find at any of the expert SEO sites.

The reason you won’t find these on most expert SEO sites is because they work. While that may sound strange, it’s really the nature of Search Engine Optimization that you have to beat out the competition in whatever niche you’re focusing on. Most SEO sites give you the basics, but not the beef. Well, here’s the beef.

1. Destroy Those Broken Links

The nature of the Internet is changing rapidly. Half a decade ago, webmasters could get by just putting together a well-optimized website consisting of a few interesting pages, and it would actually perform pretty well in the search engines and in terms of overall traffic, even over the long term.

However, these days it’s all about being current, timely and updated. People don’t want to read about information that was written back in the 1990s. The Internet is fast becoming a place where information is constantly updated, and it’s updated fast.

Just like a Facebook or Twitter status - information is current for a day. You’re on top after a new article is published on your site for about 24 hours.

If you don’t publish anything else on your site, then you better hope that you don’t have any competition. Because the only time that you’ll remain on top is if you’re the only relevant website with valuable content about a topic. If you have a lot of competition, you can only beat them out by updating with fresh content often.

2. Interlinking Makes Search Spiders Happy

When the search engine bots come around to index your website, another way to get your entire site quickly indexed and ranked highly by the search engines is to make sure your pages are well interlinked to other relevant pages of your website. For example, if you have a website about web design, and you’re writing an article about writing javacript code - take the time to search your site for other related articles about javascript. Make sure that you link to at least a few of them from that new article.

Not only does it encourage your visitors to click on the links and stay on your site longer (increasing page views per visit), but it also gets the search engine spiders to rate your website higher and more relevant to the topic as well.

Whatever you do, Google recommends that you keep your overall link-count on any specific page under 100 links, otherwise you will get penalized and you could be doing your website more harm than good.

3. Keyword Optimizing is the Heart of SEO

As much as most bloggers and webmasters hate to do it, keyword optimizing is the single most effective way to get individual pages to list high up in Google. This is because, all of the magical “algorithm” talk aside, it really comes down to the fact that people are searching for websites using keywords, and ultimately the value of your website is determined by whether or not the search engine thinks that your site applies to those keywords. Fail here - and you might as well pack up and go home.

I’ve written extensively about keyword research and search engine optimization techniques. So, the first thing to do if you’re new to keyword optimization is read through those articles and make sure you understand the right level of optimizing to rank well. The key with keywords is that too much is spam, and will significantly hurt your site, but not enough is just as bad - you won’t have a chance, especially if there are a lot of other sites writing about the same thing.

4. Invest Time to Developing Incoming Links

Finally, the last area that has the most impact on your website SEO value is incoming links. High-quality incoming links are hugely important in the eyes of the Google algorithm. It implies that other high-quality websites find your site valuable enough to link to it. These days there are few better ways to gain credibility.

So, spend time visiting other forums, blogs and websites related to your own website’s topic. Take part in the community and eventually see if the owners will let you either post a link to your site in a post or comment, or in your bio area. Any place you can get just a single link (so long as it’s not a “no-follow” link), is tremendously valuable to your own website’s SEO value. Don’t be lazy in this area - incoming links are just as valuable, if not more valuable, than any other area.

While there is a variety of things that an SEO service can do to make sure your site is well-optimized, if you can’t afford such a service, at least doing the four core things described above will ensure that in time your website will find its way to the top of the list when people search the keywords that are relevant to your website.

Good luck - and make sure to let us know how you do in the comments section below!

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Ryan is a technology writer and investigative blogger. He has been working as an online writer for numerous clients for over 5 years, and now consults webmasters and blog owners about effective SEO optimization. Ryan has 53 post(s) at Free Writing Center