What are the most underrated SEO tactics?

[jcolman]

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.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

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

[Goetzman]

I believe I remember Rand answering this question with 'badges' as the response.

[jcolman]

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!

[greghard]

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.