Many optimization problems are complex, challenging and take a significant amount of computational effort to solve. These problems have gained the attention of researchers and they have developed lots of metaheuristic algorithms to use for solving these problems. Most of the developed metaheuristic algorithms are based on some metaphors. For this reason, these algorithms have algorithm-specific parameters to reflect the nature of the inspired metaphor. This violates the algorithm's simplicity and brings extra workload to execute the algorithm. However, the optimization problems can also be solved with simple, useful, metaphor-less and algorithm-specific parameter-less metaheuristic algorithms. So, it is the essential motivation behind this study. We present a novel metaheuristic algorithm called Discrete Rao Algorithm (DRA) by updating some components of the generic Rao algorithm to solve the combinatorial optimization problems. To evaluate the performance of the DRA, we perform experiments on Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) which is the well-known combinatorial optimization problem. The experiments are performed on different sized benchmark problems in the literature. The computational results show that the developed algorithm has obtained high quality solutions in a reasonable computation time and it is competitive with other algorithms in the literature for solving the TSP.