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
-
Mass URL changes and redirecting those old URLS to the new. What is SEO Risk and best practices?
Hello good people of the MOZ community, I am looking to do a mass edit of URLS on content pages within our sites. The way these were initially setup was to be unique by having the date in the URL which was a few years ago and can make evergreen content now seem dated. The new URLS would follow a better folder path style naming convention and would be way better URLS overall. Some examples of the **old **URLS would be https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Skates/buying-guide-9-17-2012,default,pg.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kirin44355
https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Kids-Inline-Skates/buying-guide-11-13-2012,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Hockey-Skates/buying-guide-9-3-2012,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Aggressive-Skates/buying-guide-7-19-2012,default,pg.html The new URLS would look like this which would be a great improvement https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Skates,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Kids-Inline-Skates,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Hockey-Skates,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Aggressive-Skates,default,pg.html My worry is that we do rank fairly well organically for some of the content and don't want to anger the google machine. The way I would be doing the process would be to edit the URLS to the new layout, then do the redirect for them and push live. Is there a great SEO risk to doing this?
Is there a way to do a mass "Fetch as googlebot" to reindex these if I do say 50 a day? I only see the ability to do 1 URL at a time in the webmaster backend.
Is there anything else I am missing? I believe this change would overall be good in the long run but do not want to take a huge hit initially by doing something incorrectly. This would be done on 5- to a couple hundred links across various sites I manage. Thanks in advance,
Chris Gorski0 -
SEO Best Practices regarding Robots.txt disallow
I cannot find hard and fast direction about the following issue: It looks like the Robots.txt file on my server has been set up to disallow "account" and "search" pages within my site, so I am receiving warnings from the Google Search console that URLs are being blocked by Robots.txt. (Disallow: /Account/ and Disallow: /?search=). Do you recommend unblocking these URLs? I'm getting a warning that over 18,000 Urls are blocked by robots.txt. ("Sitemap contains urls which are blocked by robots.txt"). Seems that I wouldn't want that many urls blocked. ? Thank you!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jamiegriz0 -
How will changing my website's page content affect SEO?
Our company is looking to update the content on our existing web pages and I am curious what the best way to roll out these changes are in order to maintain good SEO rankings for certain pages. The infrastructure of the site will not be modified except for maybe adding a couple new pages, but existing domains will stay the same. If the domains are staying the same does it really matter if I just updated 1 page every week or so, versus updating them all at once? Just looking for some insight into how freshening up the content on the back end pages could potentially hurt SEO rankings initially. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bankable1 -
Why do people put xml sitemaps in subfolders? Why not just the root? What's the best solution?
Just read this: "The location of a Sitemap file determines the set of URLs that can be included in that Sitemap. A Sitemap file located at http://example.com/catalog/sitemap.xml can include any URLs starting with http://example.com/catalog/ but can not include URLs starting with http://example.com/images/." here: http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html#location Yet surely it's better to put the sitemaps at the root so you have:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart
(a) http://example.com/sitemap.xml
http://example.com/sitemap-chocolatecakes.xml
http://example.com/sitemap-spongecakes.xml
and so on... OR this kind of approach -
(b) http://example/com/sitemap.xml
http://example.com/sitemap/chocolatecakes.xml and
http://example.com/sitemap/spongecakes.xml I would tend towards (a) rather than (b) - which is the best option? Also, can I keep the structure the same for sitemaps that are subcategories of other sitemaps - for example - for a subcategory of http://example.com/sitemap-chocolatecakes.xml I might create http://example.com/sitemap-chocolatecakes-cherryicing.xml - or should I add a sub folder to turn it into http://example.com/sitemap-chocolatecakes/cherryicing.xml Look forward to reading your comments - Luke0 -
Will disallowing URL's in the robots.txt file stop those URL's being indexed by Google
I found a lot of duplicate title tags showing in Google Webmaster Tools. When I visited the URL's that these duplicates belonged to, I found that they were just images from a gallery that we didn't particularly want Google to index. There is no benefit to the end user in these image pages being indexed in Google. Our developer has told us that these urls are created by a module and are not "real" pages in the CMS. They would like to add the following to our robots.txt file Disallow: /catalog/product/gallery/ QUESTION: If the these pages are already indexed by Google, will this adjustment to the robots.txt file help to remove the pages from the index? We don't want these pages to be found.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andyheath0 -
Why is my client's site not ranking anymore? Like big time!
Ok, I'm reaching out to all of you Moz'rs for some help with this one. My client's site has dropped off the face of google in a real short period of time. It went from page 1 (avg rank 3 to page 6 (avg rank 50) and below in the matter of 2 weeks. Here's some facts: 1. DA is a 22 and homepage PA is a 31. It outranks all other sites in its competitive set. 2. The homepage used to be the page that displays for keyword searches, now its the FAQ page, which has a lower PA of 23. Why has the home page seemingly vaporized? And, why is the FAQ showing as the first result? What should I start checking. I feel paralyzed, not sure where to start. More info: a. There are no alerts present in Webmaster Tools. b. For some reason the homepage (domain.com) was 301'd to domain.com/home.html. Domain.com is indexed by Google, however, domain.com/home.html is not. If this is the issue, what is the best way to handle it? Thanks in advance for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rhoadesjohn1 -
Remove URLs that 301 Redirect from Google's Index
I'm working with a client who has 301 redirected thousands of URLs from their primary subdomain to a new subdomain (these are unimportant pages with regards to link equity). These URLs are still appearing in Google's results under the primary domain, rather than the new subdomain. This is problematic because it's creating an artificial index bloat issue. These URLs make up over 90% of the URLs indexed. My experience has been that URLs that have been 301 redirected are removed from the index over time and replaced by the new destination URL. But it has been several months, close to a year even, and they're still in the index. Any recommendations on how to speed up the process of removing the 301 redirected URLs from Google's index? Will Google, or any search engine for that matter, process a noindex meta tag if the URL's been redirected?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | trung.ngo0 -
Soft 404's from pages blocked by robots.txt -- cause for concern?
We're seeing soft 404 errors appear in our google webmaster tools section on pages that are blocked by robots.txt (our search result pages). Should we be concerned? Is there anything we can do about this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline4