What's your best hidden SEO secret?

[ninjamarketer]

Work hard play hard and stay away from grey or black areas

[ThomasHgenhaven]

I do that too! Only little problem with that is it often creates some significant bumps in link acquisition rates.

[ThomasHgenhaven]

One more thing: building a community and optimizing their contributions. That is the very future of SEO in my opinion.

[DonnieCooper]

I to use the free $75 of adwords (in the SEOmoz discount store) for every new customer to test their keywords. I think it's an over looked opprotunity by a ton of SEO's.

As a by product, customers love that you're running paid ads for free, and it gives you a chance to up sell them (if you can prove a return for them).

[caseyhen]

Biggest secret that I have is to make great connections to people in the business.  I can't count the number of times I've run into a strange issue and it's great to be able to email someone you've meet with your question and get some expert feedback.  Not to mention sometimes they share their super secret SEO tricks and tips.

[petrakraft]

Hi Casey - I can't click any more "Helpful" answer - but I like this one most! That is definetifely true!!

[Ken_Jansen]

Chunking the big goals into smaller ones which I can achieve a little bit each day. Keeping an eye on my top competitors to see from crawl to crawl or week to week, how fast am I gaining on them.

[Francisco_Meza]

To optimze a webpage for my number one converting keyword in Google Adwords instead of purely going off Google Keyword Tool.

[WillyF]

I run a site with a daily e-mail list. Every day I get a few out of office replies from people who subscribe to the list.These are typically college employees, and their auto-response gives me their name, e-mail address, and job title. Since I know they already use my site and I now know who they are, I can target people to make link requests with a much more personal approach. It's probably unique to my specific niche, but it actually works really well.

[petrakraft]

Thank you for your response - great suggestion!

[KrisRoadruck]

Oh man this is me to a T. Its hard to explain to others that the rest of the time spent farting around online is really a primer for this. If I just tried to come in for an hour and leave It would never be an in the zone hour.

[rmteamseo]

I think one of the most overlooked aspects of good SEO is semantic markup and good onpage optimisation, and no it is not just getting those h1s and h2s sorted.

And i totally agree with Dejan Petrovic, that one hour of "getting in the zone" makes all the difference!

[MarcinKowalik-195750]

Before creating costly, but usefull content - doing heavy topic research within the target group...

[DanDeceuster]

The secret to good SEO is to stop wasting time with automation tools. SEO simply cannot be automated and left to a robot. If it could, none of us would have jobs

If it automates directory submissions, bookmarks, articles, blog comments or anything else, it's useless and should be left alone. Far too many SEO folks waste far too much time tinkering around with them...only to figure out they are useless and that they wasted a lot of time. The Onion comically gives us another great way to stop wasting time:

http://www.theonion.com/articles/openminded-man-grimly-realizes-how-much-life-hes-w,19273/

[TheARKlady]

Hmm, secrets? First, I do seo writing so I tend to look at things from that angle but have gotten into more seo itself as I work with more businesses and web designers. I agree that working and then taking a break is a great idea because sometimes the research can blind you. LOL

But I think making sure you get the best info from the client or on the project prior to starting is essential and can help cut down the time spent in further research or is critical in targeting terms within a highly competitive category.

I also use research tools to help condense the process while I ponder competition and their optimization prior to starting.

[petrakraft]

Thank's for the reply

[MarkHodson]

My best tip: get to know the sales team. I think a lot of SEOs fail to look up from their screens and recognise they are working for a real business - and that it's the sales team that have first-hand, all-day access to your paying customers.

I've just started working for a small travel business with a sales team of three who answer phones all day from clients. I spent a session with them, explained briefly what I'm doing and asked them a slew of questions such as:

• How do people describe the products? How do they categorise types of product. This feeds directly into KW research.

• What do people ask for that isn't on the site? Great for content development ideas / usability.

• What questions do people ask about the company? For instance, if lots of people seem unsure about whether this is a real company or just a website, create a prominent "about us" section.

• At which points in the booking funnel do customers call to say they are stuck ? This is a great way of identifying usability issues. Users don't call the UX guys, they call the sales team.

It's important to remember that sales people don't give a stuff about SEO, so your first task is to explain to them that your job is to send them more leads. At this point you'll see their indifference slowly turn to interest.

Give it a try, it's incredibly valuable. Perhaps a subject for a future YouMoz post?

[petrakraft]

Great suggestions - thank's

[TheARKlady]

@Mark Hodson bought to mind something we do as a B2B service. We structured a questionaire that asks for industry terms and customer terms along with geotargeting information for local search. In many cases, the terms that the company or staff think are appropriate actually are very far from it. In addition certifications and awards often come in handy as well as professional memberships because they help us identify terms and other opportunities for SEO.

[danbocain]

Guest blogging. It's nothing new, it's nothing that requires a lot of talent, but my god! It does the trick for most clients I manage. Helps me acquires custom anchor text dofollow links from themed sites and the long term relationship with these blog owners are worth their "weight" in gold!  You get a great link, you get some referral traffic, and you expand your network. Triple win!