One of the services that our clients come to us for is, naturally, attracting more traffic to their blogs.

In the past, when you went to market your website online, you made a list of keywords / phrases and descriptions, faithfully popped them in every page’s HTML header, and submitted each of them to the major search engines, such as Yahoo!, Google, and MSN to name a few.

We were under the impression that, perhaps, that technique was valid today when marketing blogs. We now find it to be of limited value, particularly when a site has previously gotten indexed – even if you can only be found by your typing in your company or blog’s name as your search term.

Blogs, as a rule, get indexed quickly in search engines. This is especially true when the authors are steadily offering steady, fresh, and unique content – even without pumping those pages full of keywords. So, as ever, content remains king.

So, why is the keyword of the day “frustration”?

Because it appears that to make keyword magic work for you, you really have to get into the pay-per-click game. And, not surprisingly, search engines seem to frown when you try to resubmit your site just to associate it with certain keywords. It’s all about relevance and value to the readers.

So what can bloggers do? Here are some simple techniques you can use to boost your organic (read: not-paid-for) search engine listings:

Technorati
One of our favorite methods is Technorati. At this point, tagging seems to provide a much nicer return on the marketing investment. Not only can you go and index your blog on Technorati, but you can insert tags in individual posts (manually or via a plugin / widget / or module).

Blog Post Titles
It’s more important than ever to create great blog post titles. Strive toward making them enticing, filling them chock full of keywords, and making them relevant to the post you are writing about. There are blog add-ons that can help you optimize them even more.

Google Sitemaps
You can use this tool to inform search engines via an XML file about URLs on a website that are available for crawling. You can include additional information about each URL, including when it was last updated, how often it changes, and how important it is in relation to other URLs in the site. This allows search engines to crawl the site more intelligently. Go add Google Sitemaps to your blog.

Go Social Bookmarking Crazy
Got a great story, go share it (and ask others to do so) with Digg, de.lici.ous, and others.

What unpaid techniques do you find effective?