Simple SEO: explaining and understanding SEO in the simplest way possible
May 22nd, 2008 @ Hamlet Batista // 7 Comments
It’s been a while since I’ve had time to post here as I am extremely busy with RankSense. In selling an SEO software suite I answer a lot of technical questions, but, oddly enough, I feel I have become much better at explaining what SEO actually is. As SEO has become more mainstream, and [...]
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Writing for People (and Search Engines): How to improve click-through rates for organic listings
January 15th, 2008 @ Hamlet Batista // 16 Comments
Another new year has come and many of us are still analyzing the balance of successes and failures of the previous one. It is definitely a useful chore. I am happy to count this blog as one of my successes. It was humbling to see it included in SearchEngineLand’s blogroll and nominated for Best SEO [...]
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Game Plan: What marketers can learn from strategy games
November 13th, 2007 @ Hamlet Batista // 14 Comments
I was recently interviewed by the nice guys at Distilled— if you are a regular reader of this blog and you haven’t read it yet, Tom asked some really interesting questions — and one of the things I briefly mentioned was that one of my hobbies is playing chess. I’ve been playing the game for [...]
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SEO can be automated!
September 18th, 2007 @ Hamlet Batista // 17 Comments
… partially Loren Baker has asked a thought-provoking question: “Can SEO be automated?” Coincidentally he asks the question just a day after we released a product at TechCrunch40 with just such a goal. It seems that the folks at Commerce360 are working to build a product similar to our RankSense. There is a fundamental difference [...]
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Why you should target the most competitive keywords
September 10th, 2007 @ Hamlet Batista // 28 Comments
Everybody writing about SEO will tell you that it is not a good idea to optimize your site for the most popular keywords in your niche. What are your chances of success if you tried to rank for “internet marketing, where there are about half a million websites ranking for that term and most likely [...]
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Long tail vs fat head optimization strategies – Part 2
August 22nd, 2007 @ Hamlet Batista // 4 Comments
In my previous post, I explored how to assess the competitive level of your keywords and I shared my strategy for optimizing non-competitive keywords. As promised, here is my strategy for optimizing highly competitive ones. As this is a rather dense topic I will split it in two. This post will explain how to use [...]
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Long tail vs fat head optimization strategies – Part 1
August 15th, 2007 @ Hamlet Batista // 9 Comments
Optimizing for highly competitive keywords requires a completely different strategy than optimizing for non-competitive ones. First, let’s clarify a few points. When I talk about long tail or fat head keywords, I am talking in relation to the search demand for those particular keywords. I am not talking about the offer (the number of sites [...]
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Adolescent Search Engines: They are growing up so fast!
August 15th, 2007 @ Hamlet Batista // 2 Comments
Search engines are just like teenagers. Don’t believe me? Consider this analogy. Let's say you have a teenage kid with a handful of friends. He knows them very well and even remembers their phone numbers by heart. He’s bright and it doesn’t take him long to become very popular at school. Now, he has dozens [...]
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The Truth About Sitelinks: Site structure is splendid, it seems
August 9th, 2007 @ Hamlet Batista // 12 Comments
There has been a heated debate on Sphinn about a controversial post by Rand Fishkin of Seomoz. There is a lot to learn from that discussion, but instead of focusing on the debate, I want to talk about something that keeps coming up: Google's Sitelinks. Google doesn't provide a lot of information, but this is [...]
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Checkmate: Strategic vs Tactical SEO
August 2nd, 2007 @ Hamlet Batista // 11 Comments
Is SEO just a game? Consider two chess players, Mike and Tom. Mike has never been able to win against Tom. Mike knows all the rules of the game: how to move every piece, when to capture, when to castle; he even knows all the tactical ideas like forks, pins, skewers and discovered attacks. Mike's [...]
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