Diffusion is a basic mathematical tool for modern financial engineering. The theory of the estimation methods for diffusion models is an important topic of the financial engineering. Many researches have been tried to apply the likelihood estimation method for estimating diffusion models. However, the likelihood estimation method for diffusion is complicated and needs much amount of computing. In this paper we develop the estimation methods which are simple enough to be compared to the Euler approximation method, and efficient enough statistically to be compared to the likelihood estimation method. We devise pseudo-likelihood and propose the maximum pseudo-likelihood estimation methods. The pseudo-likelihoods are obtained by approximating the transition density with normal distributions. The means and the variances of the distributions are obtained from the delta expansion suggested by Lee, Song and Lee (2012). We compare the newly suggested estimators with other existing estimators by simulation study. From the simulation study we find the maximum pseudo-likelihood estimator has very similar properties with the maximum likelihood estimator. Also the maximum pseudo-likelihood estimator is easy to apply to general diffusion models, and can be obtained by simple numerical steps.