Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
What's your best hidden SEO secret?
-
Don't take that question too serious but all answers are welcome
Answer to all:
"Gentlemen, I see you did you best - at least I hope so! But after all I suppose I am stuck here to go on reading the SEOmoz blog if I can't sqeeze more secrets from you! -
My Secret is this.... Stand up and be noticed be kind be wise and be engaging and be the best you can be in your niche create something that makes people listen and look and feel and react...and share and love and want to know this person..
if you was searching on line to buy something or a service what would make you purchase or inquire from that site?
what has made you read more or buy in the past? and replicate that !! and have fun!!!
what makes you different from the rest out there its your uniqueness your personality let it shine through online
be a leader and build a community and be helpful and give give give and you will receive..
-
And here I thought I was alone in this pattern of behavior! lol... Good to see that my "in the zone" hour is nothing to worry about.
-
I see there are lots of us here having that situation. Now I feel less alone, Dejane
Btw, for me, sometimes it's 4 hours in one day, sometimes 1 hour in 2 days. And as Glenn wrote, hard to explain to someone I can give 50 hours worth work in just 1 hour sometimes. And 49 hours working can be wasted if it's not moment and mood
-
For me the best Seo strategy is to copy from others who learn more!
Just kidding ... but not too much
Maurizio
-
Yearh... I guess a lot of people run Info the information overload instead of just taking action - I know I do
-
Read an artikel about "flow" a fem months back - Kinda stating the same as you. Try and match your ongoing tasks so that you are both challenged and succeeding at the same time... This Will help build up that great momentum
-
I usually go about that Working on projects a little each Day. And then build up days like that.. Like one hour building links, one hour writing contenter and then one hour coding - or something like that
-
My friend's mobile number, who works at Google in algo scientist team .
-
So true. This Onion article does indeed make you wonder about what you stop and listen to.
-
What you experienced is called "FLOW". Check out a book called "Good Business" by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. When you achieve flow, your productivity soars.
-
Really Helpful Suggestions, heads up
-
Ok that idea is awesome!
-
Video. Adding video to each of my posts seems to build my brand and help out with things like "time on site". Posting the video to at least two or three platforms, but using the Youtube video on site sharing the same title as the post as well. Most of my videos and posts are on first page...so I think that works, but don't quote me...LOL.
-
Don't care for your competition. Don't care for the new fancy SEO stuff. Don't care for tricks or the "easy way".
Just do your homework. (site architecture, crawlability, quality links & content)
Here at SEOmoz that means:
1. Kill all the errors in "Crawl Diagnostics"
2. Bring all your keywords to an "Grade A" in On-page
3. Be the peer group leader in "Link Analysis"
Three simple steps ... easy as 1..2..3. Not really
-
Honestly it's seomoz.
-
Excellent reply, exactly what I was looking for. A breakdown of your day was very helpful.
-
Brilliant.
-
My biggest "Secret" is i prize solid keyword research above all else. All of your efforts are worthless without it.
-
Try procastinating
-
My secret is to work at night and get into my zone. Really the trick for me is to turn my A.D.D. into a strength and jump from item to item to item. It is hard to relate to unless you have A.D.D. too. You are able to hyper-focus into a wide ranged tunnel vision. By the time I come out of it I have definitely made a mark on the web!
-
I have found that just good social marketing has help a solar panels website in south Yorkshire, solar panels south yorkshire. What does everyone think to the google panda update?
-
Constantly search for new ways to build links! Think outside the box.
-
please elaborate how will this help do you mean they will link back isnt that link value then lessened for boath?
-
http://www.opencalais.com/ very interesting stuff to do with optimizing community contributions
-
Don't all nets have wholes mate?
-
Just finished with a sales guy this morning that totally fit the onion piece. Funniest thing I've read in a loong time. Thanks.
-
Hey John, you're right... an extra $30 does help. We usually add an Adwords budget into our proposals, so that we can use more than just the $75. We do this because we feel like the best keyword research is pay per click advertising.
Google Engage is great, have you signed up for the Professionals Program?
-
Hey Nick, I didn't notice this until just now- sorry about that.
Do you mean the testing process for keyword research in Adwords?
We'll research the most probable keywords for qualified visitors, and then either:
#1. test tons of exact match keywords to see real-world worth of each, or
#2. put a few very short broad keywords in, and then use the tool "see all search terms' once the campaign is over to see what the marketplace is actually searching forThen of course, we optimize the site and create a link building plan for those phrases.
-
Flow
Read this book and it may help you on your quest....
-
My best hidden SEO secret would be adding the websites phone number into the meta keywords for the homepage only. If you have a missed call from someone, most people just Google the number however if you have the number in your meta description/keywords it will display your homepage as opposed to your contact page. Once they are on the homepage they will more than likely check the contact us page then hopefully browse the website. I sometimes use an image for the contact number on the contact us page so it isnt picked up by the crawler. Its a pretty small secret but its one of mine
-
Hi Donnie,
I agree about this idea being a great one. I just signed up for something called "Google Engage" (it's part of google), where you take a few online classes and they give you 20 $105 Adwords vouchers for clients. I imagine if you use the 20 and bring new customers they'll probably keep the vouchers coming.
I'm new to it so I can't say too much, but the extra $30 might get you the stats you need to convince a client.
-
HI kaashif, what are your directory sites of choice, do you have a list that fits all such as dmoz types, then a list that fits a few and a list of niche or do you just formulate a new list for each project from scratch.
-
now that's being creative imho, thank you for sharing mate - sometimes I end up in the paranoia tunnel avoiding some obvious solutions -
-
That really is good advice. We do something similar with fortnightly meetings between customer advisors, web developers and SEO. Quite often CAs will have great ideas from the sharp end. www.pretavoir.co.uk
-
I really like your list. Patience, consistency, and continual learning is the truly the core "skill set".
-
Indeed. I tried to explain this truth to my employer once. He didn't get it. Now he's not my employer, and their site's traffic plummeted to 30% of what it was when I "spent half my day farting around".
Farting around isn't. It's accessing inspiration. It's competitive research. It's market research. It's natural link-building. It's accessing actionable information. It's expanding your mind to think outside the box of your perceptions. It's relationship-building. It's really important, even though it's difficult to forecast the ROI of such "R&D"
-
Social is..... (go test)
-
Meet with your Client's face to face.
Once they can see how confident and passionate you are about SEO and their success, they will trust you further and be quicker to take on your ideas and recommendations.
-
Remembering to keep an open mind to new ideas and concepts, testing them, and ensuring that I keep a mental note of both "do more of that" when they work and "not even if hell freezes over" when they don't (except when google changes something).
-
A website called SEOmoz.org. Shh.
-
Stop hoarding the link juice and link out to related sites! Not so much a secret but something that is too often overlooked.
-
I've long held a business idea based on just this issue: hiring out henchmen who are paid to beat you up if you don't meet your deadlines. I'm sure a "gun to your head" option, charged hourly, could be arranged to suit your particular requirements.
-
So true. I still think we are secretly being productive in the down town. SEO is much more creative than people give it credit for. A little bit of everything involved!
-
RSS TO TWITTER!
-
Very nice feedback, thanks for this.
-
Great idea Donnie. This comment may well have changed our initial SEO strategy. I'm guessing you've got experience in this area - can I be nosey and ask what your testing process is?
Many thanks!
-
Off topic - this doesn't apply
-
Red Bull - "It gives you wings!
-
Our site is customer facing, and we need to keep the content low in some cases, so we use different JQuery plugins to 'hide' some content from the viewers.... but not search engines
I wouldn't say it's black hat as the content is 100% original and very authoratitive (optimised oviously), it's just a way of getting your content on the page without having the old CSS margin: -10000000000000px trick I bet you all know!!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Can subdomains hurt your primary domain's SEO?
Our primary website https://domain.com has a subdomain https://subDomain.domain.com and on that subdomain we have a jive-hosted community, with a few links to and fro. In GA they are set up as different properties but there are many SEO issues in the jive-hosted site, in which many different people can create content, delete content, comment, etc. There are issues related to how jive structures content, broken links, etc. My question is this: Aside from the SEO issues with the subdomain, can the performance of that subdomain negatively impact the SEO performance and rank of the primary domain? I've heard and read conflicting reports about this and it would be nice to hear from the MOZ community about options to resolve such issues if they exist. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BHeffernan1 -
Forwarded vanity domains, suddenly resolving to 404 with appended URL's ending in random 5 characters
We have several vanity domains that forward to various pages on our primary domain.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SS.Digital
e.g. www.vanity.com (301)--> www.mydomain.com/sub-page (200) These forwards have been in place for months or even years and have worked fine. As of yesterday, we have seen the following problem. We have made no changes in the forwarding settings. Now, inconsistently, they sometimes resolve and sometimes they do not. When we load the vanity URL with Chrome Dev Tools (Network Pane) open, it shows the following redirect chains, where xxxxx represents a random 5 character string of lower and upper case letters. (e.g. VGuTD) EXAMPLE:
www.vanity.com (302, Found) -->
www.vanity.com/xxxxx (302, Found) -->
www.vanity.com/xxxxx (302, Found) -->
www.vanity.com/xxxxx/xxxxx (302, Found) -->
www.mydomain.com/sub-page/xxxxx (404, Not Found) This is just one example, the amount of redirects, vary wildly. Sometimes there is only 1 redirect, sometimes there are as many as 5. Sometimes the request will ultimately resolve on the correct mydomain.com/sub-page, but usually it does not (as in the example above). We have cross-checked across every browser, device, private/non-private, cookies cleared, on and off of our network etc... This leads us to believe that it is not at the device or host level. Our Registrar is Godaddy. They have not encountered this issue before, and have no idea what this 5 character string is from. I tend to believe them because per our analytics, we have determined that this problem only started yesterday. Our primary question is, has anybody else encountered this problem either in the last couple days, or at any time in the past? We have come up with a solution that works to alleviate the problem, but to implement it across hundreds of vanity domains will take us an inordinate amount of time. Really hoping to fix the cause of the problem instead of just treating the symptom.0 -
Help FORUM ( User generated content ) SEO best practices
Hello Moz folks ! For the very first time im dealing with a massive community who rely on UGC ( user generated content ). Their forum is finding a great deal of duplicate content/broken link/ duplicate title and on-site issue. I have Advance SEO knowledge related to ecommerce or blogging but new to forum and UGC. I would really love to learn or get ressources links that would allow me to see/understand the best practices in term of SEO. Any help is greatly appreciated. Best, Yan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ydesjardins2000 -
404's - Do they impact search ranking/how do we get rid of them?
Hi, We recently ran the Moz website crawl report and saw a number of 404 pages from our site come back. These were returned as "high priority" issues to fix. My question is, how do 404's impact search ranking? From what Google support tells me, 404's are "normal" and not a big deal to fix, but if they are "high priority" shouldn't we be doing something to remove them? Also, if I do want to remove the pages, how would I go about doing so? Is it enough to go into Webmaster tools and list it as a link no to crawl anymore or do we need to do work from the website development side as well? Here are a couple of examples that came back..these are articles that were previously posted but we decided to close out: http://loyalty360.org/loyalty-management/september-2011/let-me-guessyour-loyalty-program-isnt-working http://loyalty360.org/resources/article/mark-johnson-speaks-at-motivation-show Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | carlystemmer0 -
Using the same content on different TLD's
HI Everyone, We have clients for whom we are going to work with in different countries but sometimes with the same language. For example we might have a client in a competitive niche working in Germany, Austria and Switzerland (Swiss German) ie we're going to potentially rewrite our website three times in German, We're thinking of using Google's href lang tags and use pretty much the same content - is this a safe option, has anyone actually tries this successfully or otherwise? All answers appreciated. Cheers, Mel.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dancape1 -
Do links to PDF's on my site pass "link juice"?
Hi, I have recently started a project on one of my sites, working with a branch of the U.S. government, where I will be hosting and publishing some of their PDF documents for free for people to use. The great SEO side of this is that they link to my site. The thing is, they are linking directly to the PDF files themselves, not the page with the link to the PDF files. So my question is, does that give me any SEO benefit? While the PDF is hosted on my site, there are no links in it that would allow a spider to start from the PDF and crawl the rest of my site. So do I get any benefit from these great links? If not, does anybody have any suggestions on how I could get credit for them. Keep in mind that editing the PDF's are not allowed by the government. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rayvensoft0 -
Bing flags multiple H1's as an issue of high importance--any case studies?
Going through Bing's SEO Analyzer and found that Bing thinks having multiple H1's on a page is an issue. It's going to be quite a bit of work to remove the H1 tags from various pages. Do you think this is a major issue or not? Does anyone know of any case studies / interviews to show that fixing this will lead to improvement?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Culling 99% of a website's pages. Will this cause irreparable damage?
I have a large travel site that has over 140,000 pages. The problem I have is that the majority of pages are filled with dupe content. When Panda came in, our rankings were obliterated, so I am trying to isolate the unique content on the site and go forward with that. The problem is, the site has been going for over 10 years, with every man and his dog copying content from it. It seems that our travel guides have been largely left untouched and are the only unique content that I can find. We have 1000 travel guides in total. My first question is, would reducing 140,000 pages to just 1,000 ruin the site's authority in any way? The site does use internal linking within these pages, so culling them will remove thousands of internal links throughout the site. Also, am I right in saying that the link juice should now move to the more important pages with unique content, if redirects are set up correctly? And finally, how would you go about redirecting all theses pages? I will be culling a huge amount of hotel pages, would you consider redirecting all of these to the generic hotels page of the site? Thanks for your time, I know this is quite a long one, Nick
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Townpages0