What are the most underrated SEO tactics?
-
Looking over the discussion of underrated SEO tactics at http://sphinn.com/story/178993/ , I'm curious if folks here have any favorite SEO tactics that they feel are ignored, underrated, or somehow not appreciated by the community at large. Any thoughts?
Among the tactics listed in the Sphinn post:
- Blog commenting
- Analytics to identify low-hanging keyword fruit
- Getting your site set up properly at the server level
- Unique and relevant imagery
- Internal links
- Google Place page optimization
- Several more...
Any others that should be included? I'd personally add segmenting your keyword traffic into trademark (those that mention your brand name) versus non-trademark segments for more thorough analysis.
-
I have to add my vote for one I saw on that post - image optimization / alt tags. I've noticed an improvement in rankings by optimizing alt tags, plus they sometimes show up as part of the SERP snippet (when keywords are in the query) which means they have CTR implications as well.
-
UPDATE: Here's a follow-up discussion from Sphinn about the most overrated SEO tactics.
Examples include:
- XML Sitemaps
- Standards-compliance
- Keyword density
- Toolbar PageRank
- Many others...
Enjoy!
-
I believe I remember Rand answering this question with 'badges' as the response.
-
I dont know about other countries, but here in the UK there are a deplorable number of so-called "SEO companies" who seem to ignore the importance of well written content and instead try to fool people into thinking that a few site changes is all thats needed, and in turn, build the content for the search engines thereby slowly killing their customers website.
This I find falls into the "ignored" category.
Regards,
Andy
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
-
New Subdomain SEO questions
I have a main site - mysite.com. I just created a subdomain - leadform.mysite.com I plan to use the leadform.mysite.com as a 1 page lead form only. I will link to leadform.mysite.com from mysite.com and also from other websites I own (myothersite.com etc.) - filtering all traffic to this form to capture leads. (Note - the leadform.mysite.com has CNAME to other server that hosts the backend of the form) My questions are: How should I link from mysite.com to leadform.mysite.com? With dofollow or nofollow? (mysite.com has 1000's of pages and would link from every page with "get a quote' type button) 2) How should I link from myothersite.com to leadform.mysite.com? With dofollow or nofollow? Any SEO risk linking to leadform.mysite.com from an outside domain? (myothersite.com has 1000's of pages and would link from every page with "get a quote' type button) Does it make sense to build links from outside sites to leadform.mysite.com directly to try to get that lead capture page to rank on it's own? 4) Does it make sense to link back from leadform.mysite.com back to mysite.com for seo value? With dofollow or nofollow? Thanks in advance for any help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | leadforms0 -
SEO question
Hi there! I'm the SEO manager for 5 Star Loans. I have 2 city pages running. We are running our business in 2 locations: Berkeley, CA & San Jose, CA. For those offices we've created 2 google listings with separate gmail accounts. Berkeley (http://5starloans.com/berkeley/) ranks well in Berkeley in Gmaps and it shows on first page in organic results. However the second city page San Jose (http://5starloans.com/san-jose/) doesn't show in the Gmaps local pack results and also doesn't rank well in organic results. Both of them have authentic backlinks and reviews. It has been a year already and it's high time we knew the problem 🙂 any comment would be helpful. thanks a lot
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moonalev0 -
Yoast or Premium SEO Pack?
Which one is better Yoast or premium SEO pack excluding that one is paid & other is free. Because when we are doing SEO $39 doesn't make a huge difference as compared to the work we do right? Which one will you suggest out of the two?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | welcomecure0 -
Yoast seo title question
I was referred to this plugin and have found it to be the most irritating and poorly designed plugin in the world. I want to be able to set my titles without it changing my page headers as well. For instance - If I set my title to be "This is my article name | site name" it will make my H1 tag read the same. I do not want or desire this nonsense. Why would they think this is something wise? Why would I want my site name on every single H1 tag on my site? How can I fix this? I only want my title to be my title. I want my H1 tag to remain the post/page name that I define in wordpress.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Atomicx0 -
SEO for a redirected domain name
Our client is a law firm with a name that is challenging to spell. We have procured a domain name for them that is catchy, easy to spell, and plays well into their brand, or at least the current campaign. We're using the campaign domain to direct traffic to their website with a 301 redirect. We have placed the campaign domain in a variety of offline mediums including print and outdoor. The client is currently in the number 1 spot for a good number of our highest priority keywords, so I do not want to do anything to jeopardize that. I'm also not sure this campaign will be their "brand" long-term so I don't want to risk making a switch and making it back. So for now, I'm most comfortable leaving the campaign domain as a redirect to their primary domain. Recently, the client approached me complaining (legitimately) that when people google the campaign domain, they are brought to search results for an entirely different domain because Google "corrects" the domain name for them. This is obviously a bad thing, with many users defaulting to entering urls into Google instead of the address bar. If you tell Google that it was wrong about the autocorrection, our site is in the number 1 position. I liken the situation to Overstock.com using O.co as their offline domain, but overstock.com as their online domain. But imagine if you googled o.co and google brought you to a list of results for "on.co" because it assumed you fat-fingered it. Is there anything I can do to prevent the domain name from getting corrected by Google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | steverobinson0 -
SEO on page content links help
I run a website at the bottom we have scroller box which the old SEO guy used to contain all of the crap content so we can rank for keywords not on the page and put all of the links in to spread the link juice into the other inner category pages (some of these pages are only listed on our innerpages otherwise). We are trying to remove this content and add decent content above the fold with relevant long tail keywords in (it is currently decent but could do with expanding if we are removing this large chunk of text in theSEO box and some long tail keywords will be missing if we just remove it) we can add a couple of links into this new content but will struggle to list the category pages not on the left hand navigation. If we were to list all of the pages in the left hand nav would we dilute the power going to the main pages currently or would we be in the same position we are now? For example at the minute I would say the power is mainly going to the left hand nav links and then a small amount of power to the links in the SEO content if we put these into the nav will it not dilute the power to the main pages. Thank you for your time and hopefully your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
SEO Recommendations
For about 3 years our website was number one in Google.co.uk for our trades main keyphrase which resulted in excellent sales. About 12 months ago that position started to slide downwards and for that keyphrase we are now number 10. We are still at number's 1,2 and 3 for several other keyphrases but ones that result in fewer daily Google searches and resultant sales. I have always added unique content to the site but admit that my blog posts became less than daily over the past 12 months. However I am adding posts as often as I can now, of good length and of unique content. As well as tweaking all our online seo factors I'm trying to add good backlinks as often as possible. I wonder if anyone has been in a similar position and what they did to try and regain their previous position? Colin
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NileCruises0 -
Am I Doing This Wrong? Ecommerce SEO
I ran my site through the SEOMoz On-Page Optimization tool and one of the problems noted was "Keyword Self-Cannibalization" in this case, it was stating I was using the keyword "Board Games" too much. Site in question: http://theboardgamers.co.uk/ The problem being is that every product link contains the word "Board Game" - Which makes sense, but I guess it may look spammy to the SEO world. Would it be best to remove the "board game" part from each internal link and only leave it in the URL structure?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | REMOVE560