You think you've done all you can for your website's SEO, but you'd still like to see better results. Who wouldn't? Believe it or not, even with all the work you put in, you might have overlooked a few easy – and, to be honest, not so easy – ways to increase your site's traffic and visibility. Keep reading to see what you may have missed.

You're well optimized for Google, right? In fact, you're so well optimized that your site is high on the first page for a number of your important keywords. You're not sure how you can push it higher to get more traffic, because it will take a lot of effort. Well, maybe you don't want to push it higher in Google just yet. Have you thought about Bing?

Don't laugh. Instead, do this experiment: find out how many of your site's web pages are in Google's index. Now do the same experiment for Bing. If there's a big difference, there's room for improvement. You might also want to check how many keywords put your site on the first page of Google...and how many of those same keywords put you on the first page of Bing. If you fix this problem, you could see a lot more traffic coming from this often-neglected search engine. One simple way to do this is to submit a sitemap.xml file through Bing's webmaster system.

Okay, you've achieved a high position in Google for a lot of keywords. How did you do it? If you can point to one thing that got you there, you're in trouble – because if that one tactic stops working, you're going to see a fast drop in your rankings. Just ask anyone site owner pulling their hair out over Google Panda.

To get a good ranking in Google, many webmasters focus on links. Every link, though, has a human being behind it. That means you need to offer something on your website that human beings will think is worth linking to and sharing with others. This is the real reason that content is king online – but content and links must work together, or you won't get traffic. In short, you'll need to use a number of techniques, focused on building content and links, to gain and maintain high rankings in Google.

Here's a fundamental issue that you should be able to solve a little more quickly. Do you have all of your non-www URL pages set to 301 redirect to the appropriate www URL pages? If not, you could be splitting up your link juice, and losing credit the pages really deserve. Google has no way of knowing that www.yoursitepage.com and yoursitepage.com are the same page. Therefore, if it sees a link to yoursitepage.com, it's going to give the credit for that “vote” to yoursitepage.com, not www.yoursitepage.com, even though they have the same content. If you set up the 301 redirect properly, you'll concentrate the “votes” on one canonical URL, thus improving your rankings in Google.

For more tips, visit: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/5-often-surprisingly-overlooked-seo-tactics/29739/.

DISCLAIMER: The content provided in this article is not warranted or guaranteed by Developer Shed, Inc. The content provided is intended for entertainment and/or educational purposes in order to introduce to the reader key ideas, concepts, and/or product reviews. As such it is incumbent upon the reader to employ real-world tactics for security and implementation of best practices. We are not liable for any negative consequences that may result from implementing any information covered in our articles or tutorials. If this is a hardware review, it is not recommended to open and/or modify your hardware.

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