Having your site top-ranked for a hot keyword can effectively improve your traffic and therefore your profits as well. All you need to do is to optimise your content and create many links of different quality. But if you don't have any money to start off, its hard but it can be done.

You may also have the money it takes for reaching a top position, but are unsure if your money will be well spent or not. It may cost you a whole lot more than you thought in the beginning. Whether you have the money or not, considering a self made budget SEO is a wise thing to do, because it's both free and educating. After a while, you will gradually improve your technique and you will become an SEO expert. Once you're there, you will be able to perform as good as a paid SEO but saving the money it takes to hire one.

Here's 10 free ways to improve your rankings

1. Directory submissions - The most effective way in getting lots of back links fast. Grab a good directory list and submit your link in every single directory. Make sure that you get a few new back links everyday to ensure long term success. The best way to do that is by viewing all new directory announcements in Digital Points forum Solicitations & Announcements section.

2. Article Submissions - Almost every single article directory on the web is free. Article directories are a good compliment to ordinary directories because it will bring you more diversity in your back link structure. Write a good article with more than 500 words and include a back link to your site and submit it to all major article directories. Hope fully, if your article is good, some webmaster will pick it and put it on their own sites, so you're not only getting back links from the article directories themselves, you are also getting free back links from real sites, which is very valuable in search engines like Google.

3. Wikipedia.org - A good source to collect incoming links. Do you have any content that is related to any wikipedia article? In that case, you can edit the wikipedia article and input your link on the link page. Make sure that the content you are linking meets up with the standard, otherwise, your link will be removed as fast as it came up.

4. Onpage SEO - Onpage optimisation was the most important SEO technique available before 2001. Today, it does not have the same decisive factor that it once had. It is however still very useful to do some basic onpage SEO. Make sure that your targeted keywords are included in the title, the headline and the footer. Make sure that you always provide some fresh content on the pages that you specifically want to optimise. Provide it at least with an RSS feed. But most important, make sure that the onpage SEO does not overshadow the content and make your site look less useful.

5. PRWeb.com - Post a press release once you release your site. It will help you a little bit in the rankings, but most importantly, if your Press release is good, you will get some natural links generated by PRWebs users.

6. Myspace.com - Myspace has recently become one of the hottest sites on the internet. It has also became one of the most effective places to market your site. Just make a profile for your site there, then try to get as many friends as possible. Post links to your sites on other profiles, post bulletins of your site and if it's cool enough, you will get some natural back links in return.

7. Ask for back links - Send out nice original emails to other webmasters that have similar sites. Write some sentences about what you think of their site or anything related to the subject of their site. When you get the reply, answer them, tell them something more and then ask for a reciprocal or a one-way link.

8. Forums - Forums are not only a great place to discuss things but also a good resource for generating back links, feedback and traffic. Put a link in your signature. Make a post about your site or even better, make a post about something and then make a related link to your site. Note, go for inactive forums, they tend to give more weight than the active ones and your link will be displayed over a longer time.

9. Make satellite sites - Put up a site with some content on e.g. geocities.com and include a back link to your site somewhere, then submit the satellite site to somewhere around 100 directories so it will be indexed in Google, and you got a high quality back link.

10. Also, SEO is an area where there are lots of paid alternatives that may help you in getting a good ranking. Some of these are paid article submission, paid onpage optimisation, paid directory submission paid link exchanges and paid links. If you are good on doing directory submissions but bad on onpage SEO, you can charge for making directory submissions for others and then hire someone to do onpage SEO for you.