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
-
Change Google's version of Canonical link
Hi My website has millions of URLs and some of the URLs have duplicate versions. We did not set canonical all these years. Now we wanted to implement it and fix all the technical SEO issues. I wanted to consolidate and redirect all the variations of a URL to the highest pageview version and use that as the canonical because all of these variations have the same content. While doing this, I found in Google search console that Google has already selected another variation of URL as canonical and not the highest pageview version. My questions: I have millions of URLs for which I have to do 301 and set canonical. How can I find all the canonical URLs that Google has autoselected? Search Console has a daily quota of 100 or something. Is it possible to override Google's version of Canonical? Meaning, if I set a variation as Canonical and it is different than what Google has already selected, will it change overtime in Search Console? Should I just do a 301 to highest pageview variation of the URL and not set canonicals at all? This way the canonical that Google auto selected might get redirected to the highest pageview variation of the URL. Any advice or help would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SDCMarketing0 -
Need a layman's definition/analogy of the difference between schema and structured data
I'm currently writing a blog post about schema. However I want to set the record straight that schema is not exactly the same as structured data, although both are often used interchangeably. I understand this schema.org is a vocabulary of global identifiers for properties and things. Structured data is what Google officially stated as "a standard way to annotate your content so machines can understand it..." Does anybody know of a good analogy to compare the two? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB0 -
Partial Match or RegEx in Search Console's URL Parameters Tool?
So I currently have approximately 1000 of these URLs indexed, when I only want roughly 100 of them. Let's say the URL is www.example.com/page.php?par1=ABC123=&par2=DEF456=&par3=GHI789= All the indexed URLs follow that same kinda format, but I only want to index the URLs that have a par1 of ABC (but that could be ABC123 or ABC456 or whatever). Using URL Parameters tool in Search Console, I can ask Googlebot to only crawl URLs with a specific value. But is there any way to get a partial match, using regex maybe? Am I wasting my time with Search Console, and should I just disallow any page.php without par1=ABC in robots.txt?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ria_0 -
What's the best possible URL structure for a local search engine?
Hi Mozzers, I'm working at AskMe.com which is a local search engine in India i.e if you're standing somewhere & looking for the pizza joints nearby, we pick your current location and share the list of pizza outlets nearby along with ratings, reviews etc. about these outlets. Right now, our URL structure looks like www.askme.com/delhi/pizza-outlets for the city specific category pages (here, "Delhi" is the city name and "Pizza Outlets" is the category) and www.askme.com/delhi/pizza-outlets/in/saket for a category page in a particular area (here "Saket") in a city. The URL looks a little different if you're searching for something which is not a category (or not mapped to a category, in which case we 301 redirect you to the category page), it looks like www.askme.com/delhi/search/pizza-huts/in/saket if you're searching for pizza huts in Saket, Delhi as "pizza huts" is neither a category nor its mapped to any category. We're also dealing in ads & deals along with our very own e-commerce brand AskMeBazaar.com to make the better user experience and one stop shop for our customers. Now, we're working on URL restructure project and my question to you all SEO rockstars is, what can be the best possible URL structure we can have? Assume, we have kick-ass developers who can manage any given URL structure at backend.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | _nitman0 -
What's the best way to redirect categories & paginated pages on a blog?
I'm currently re-doing my blog and have a few categories that I'm getting rid of for housecleaning purposes and crawl efficiency. Each of these categories has many pages (some have hundreds). The new blog will also not have new relevant categories to redirect them to (1 or 2 may work). So what is the best place to properly redirect these pages to? And how do I handle the paginated URLs? The only logical place I can think of would be to redirect them to the homepage of the blog, but since there are so many pages, I don't know if that's the best idea. Does anybody have any thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kking41200 -
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 -
Does Google crawl the pages which are generated via the site's search box queries?
For example, if I search for an 'x' item in a site's search box and if the site displays a list of results based on the query, would that page be crawled? I am asking this question because this would be a URL that is non existent on the site and hence am confused as to whether Google bots would be able to find it.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pulseseo0 -
URL Length or Exact Breadcrumb Navigation URL? What's More Important
Basically my question is as follows, what's better: www.romancingdiamonds.com/gemstone-rings/amethyst-rings/purple-amethyst-ring-14k-white-gold (this would fully match the breadcrumbs). or www.romancingdiamonds.com/amethyst-rings/purple-amethyst-ring-14k-white-gold (cutting out the first level folder to keep the url shorter and the important keywords are closer to the root domain). In this question http://www.seomoz.org/qa/discuss/37982/url-length-vs-url-keywords I was consulted to drop a folder in my url because it may be to long. That's why I'm hesitant to keep the bradcrumb structure the same. To the best of your knowldege do you think it's best to drop a folder in the URL to keep it shorter and sweeter, or to have a longer URL and have it match the breadcrumb structure? Please advise, Shawn
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Romancing0