
We’ve all heard of META tags and titles; every Webmaster and their cousin know about keywords and stuffing them in the right places to get rankings.
But, there do exist some not so common search engine optimization techniques that can help you rank better.
Secret Tactic #1 – META rel=canonical
Google hates duplicate content and the more original the pages within your website look, the easier it is for you to rank better.
According to Google every unique URL is a unique page, and it can’t differentiate pages with different URLs and the same content like a user would.
Something that can come in very handy in this situation is the rel=canonical META tag.
What rel=canonical does is, when you have two pages with the same content that have been built for a purpose, you can add an absolute canonical URL that correctly represents what you want Google to index, thus eliminating duplicate content penalties.
Read more about rel=canonical at Google Webmaster Central.
Secret Tactic #2 – Author Information via Google+
If you’ve noticed recently in Google’s search engine results, you would have seen a lot of results that look like this:

These Google+ author thumbnails increase the probability of a user clicking on your result; this is simply because your result stands out!
You can implement these thumbnails by adding a rel=author attribute in your header section and linking out to your Google+ profile.
You can read instructions about how to do this here.
Secret Tactic #3 – www Redirect
Though this tactic can still be classified as “old school”, it is extremely vital in ensuring that you don’t have two versions of the same page in the search engine index.
If you currently do not have a www to non-www redirect, or vice versa, consider doing this ASAP.
You can read instructions on how to do this, here.
Secret Tactic #4 – Start Guest Posting!
If you’re someone who enjoys writing content, you can generate tons of backlinks (which help you rank better) by creating guest posts for other bloggers.
The interesting thing about guest blogging is that, it’s non-intrusive and you can generate quality backlinks by using this method.
Wondering about where you can find a list of guest blogging opportunities? This article might help.
At the end of the day, the secret to better search engine rankings is having a more consistent SEO strategy and ensuring that you’re never doing something against Google’s TOS.
We hope that these four tactics will help you boost your rankings!
The author runs an Organic SEO Company and recommends that you do plenty of research before zeroing in on a company that provides SEO Services