'Pick low-hanging SEO fruit'

Marketers should consider how they can enhance their website's search engine rankings by concentrating on reasonably well-optimised pages that could perform better.

This is according to Rand Fishkin of the SEOmoz blog, who suggested looking at issues such as image alt tags, the positioning of keywords within title tags and using long tail keyword modifiers to boost the SEO value of top-ranking pages further.

He also advised focusing on improving the rankings of content that appears on the second page of search engine results and creating a sitemaps.xml file that is verified with all three of the major search engines rather than just Google.

"We've seen a lot of sites ignoring Yahoo! and MSN - a big mistake! You can seriously boost your search traffic referrals from these engines by not only submitting, but verifying/registering your sitemaps with them," Mr Fishkin commented.

About 71 per cent of websites currently have a sitemap, according to the Nielsen Norman Group.