Here’s something you may want to look into, in getting your site ranked better: domain canonicalization.
Any single webpage may be accessed through a number of URLs, but mainly it’s between www.domain.com vs. domain.com (without the “www”). In the eyes of Google, these URLs are different entities, so they get indexed separately – not good for SEO. Why? Because it will split up the rankings.
To canonize a domain is basically to assign the best URL version for search engines to crawl and index. Close to the original use of the term, it’s like giving it a saintly status.
To check how your site is indexed by big G, do a site: search. Compare the results between site:www.domain.com and site:domain.com. Whichever version turns up most on the results page is your better bet when it comes to creating backlinks.
Take a look at this example where only one version of the domain is indexed:
site:www.domain.com search turns up with no results
site:domain.com search shows pages have been indexed
Consistency is key. If the non-www domain.com version is indexed, then there is no use building backlinks using www.domain.com because it may not do your rankings any good.
But for this website, seowebsite.com, the www-version shows up on both search parameters:
The domain.com search comes up with all www.domain.com results
On this search using www.domain.com, it shows all 14 pages are indexed
To manually set your preference, set up an account at Google Webmaster Tools and go to: Site configuration > Settings > Preferred Domains. Check their help page here. You may additionally do a 301-redirect to your preferred canonical domain, which is pretty much telling the other search engines your preference, too.
There’s also an option to redirect straight from your web host. In which case, it essentially diverts traffic to just one domain, instead of scattering them to the different URL versions.
So, today I learned that one of my new blogs, juantobuy.com is not indexed as www.juantobuy.com. In effect, I will put all backlinking efforts toward the former URL, to maintain consistency (I just did it right there). For this website, however, www.seowebsite.com is more dominant, so that’s what needs to be used from this point on.
Domain canonicalization sounds like a complicated business, but it really isn’t.