What do you do/use for SEO?

[Albert Wiersch]

This is kind of like a poll question. What do you do or use to advertise your site or to help people find you through the search engines?

Also, I thought this site was interesting:
http://www.seositecheckup.com/

[Johnkitty]

Of course, using or doing SEO for site will be better than doing advertising. This will save money, but it take long time to do it, and achieve the goal. Also must be patient in doing SEO.

[omnireso]

Hello,

I mainly use web directories, to whom I submit my client's websites using unique descriptions.
The major search engine's dashboards also provide useful guidelines (backlinks, ranks, SEO tips...)

[Lou]

I submit a sitemap.xml to Google, Yahoo and Bing. also use RSS. I use robots.txt to guide bots away from things like forms and other non-content files.

There seems to be some disagreement over search engine use of meta key words and descriptions vs what their own bots find in the page. However, I do spend some time customizing these.

[almedajohnson]

i used to do research and analysis first and then optimize my site. Used to do both off page and on page optimization

[rag_gupta]

I've just now started to understand one new seo principle...that your site's ranking in SERP can be directly proportional to user's time spent in site and also how much he/she is satisfied with SERP( does she search again or click SERP?). I think this is easy for a search engine to track.
One requirement before this will be that the title should be optimized well for search engines.

Total backlinks matter less. What's the use of such links however precious when the user simply skips and does not find her answer?

I'm learning this from many of my sites.

[Albert Wiersch]

I've just now started to understand one new seo principle...that your site's ranking in SERP can be directly proportional to user's time spent in site and also how much he/she is satisfied with SERP( does she search again or click SERP?). I think this is easy for a search engine to track.
One requirement before this will be that the title should be optimized well for search engines.

Interesting! Yes, this seems like another measure that search engines can use for rankings. I wonder though, have you come across any "studies" that examine this in more detail?