What's your best hidden SEO secret?

[HiveDigitalInc]

1. Create a bunch of blackhat, auto-genned spammy sites in your space...

2. See what they automatically get long-tail traffic on...

3. Write content on your site targeting those keywords...

[petrakraft]

Lol - that's a different approach ...

[tomcraig86]

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!!

[dlrPaul]

Red Bull - "It gives you wings!

[petrakraft]

Off topic - this doesn't apply

[NickPateman81]

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!

[MontanaFlynn83]

Very nice feedback, thanks for this.

[Tradingpost]

RSS TO TWITTER!

[AaronSchinke]

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!

[jdeb]

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.

[Shareef-Defrawi]

Stop hoarding the link juice and link out to related sites! Not so much a secret but something that is too often overlooked.

[IslandLogic70]

A website called SEOmoz.org. Shh.

[IPINGlobal54]

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).

[WME]

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.

[SEO-Doctor]

Social is..... (go test)

[glennfriesen]

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"

[glennfriesen]

I really like your list. Patience, consistency, and continual learning is the truly the core "skill set".

[seanmccauley]

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

[PabloGV]

now that's being creative imho, thank you for sharing mate - sometimes I end up in the paranoia tunnel avoiding some obvious solutions -

[IPIM]

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.