My SMX West Experience and Pitching the Business Value of SEO
March 5th, 2008 @ Hamlet Batista // 4 Comments
I haven’t been blogging as often as usual lately and it’s about time I get back on track. I attended my first search marketing conference last week. I do not consider myself much of a conference-goer and I am not really much of an extrovert. Previously, I’d been to only two conferences—JavaOne in 2003, but [...]
Read More »Category : Blog &SEO Technology
The Unsuspecting Recruit: Why every SEO MUST learn Internet security
February 6th, 2008 @ Hamlet Batista // 15 Comments
Internet security is a big problem, and it isn’t just for the IT staff anymore. It affects us as SEOs. Don’t believe me? Consider the incident reported at the end of last year by security research firm Sunbelt Software. …criminals are now combining SEO tactics and booby-trapped Web pages, and doing it systematically. By [...]
Read More »Category : Blog &Featured Posts
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 [...]
Read More »Category : Blog &On-page SEO
Share and Share Alike
December 11th, 2007 @ Hamlet Batista // 15 Comments
Last May I decided to start this blog as the key driver for my personal branding strategy. The idea was that, in order to attract attention, I would share my most valuable ideas and insights. My geeky side loves to teach and share, but my business side tries to prevent me from releasing potentially sensitive [...]
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Google: The New Market Gorilla
December 6th, 2007 @ Hamlet Batista // 16 Comments
Every company, big or small, faces unfavorable market conditions at some point in its trajectory. The common sense thing to do is to try to adapt—modify the business strategy to survive and continue thriving. Unfortunately some companies, especially big and successful ones like Google or Microsoft, are stubborn and prefer that the market adapt to [...]
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Pay to Play: Common sense tips to help you improve your Google Adwords Quality Score
November 30th, 2007 @ Hamlet Batista // 17 Comments
One of the most frustrating aspects for novice pay-per-click (PPC) marketers is the so-called ad quality score—a method search engines use to measure the relevancy of an ad for a particular keyword. The ad quality score affects the minimum bid price, position and display eligibility. Poor ads cost a lot more and are less [...]
Read More »Category : Blog &Paid Search
A Little Personality Goes a Long Way
November 28th, 2007 @ Hamlet Batista // 9 Comments
If you read my last post on advanced keyword research, you probably thought that there was no way you could look deeper into your search visitors’ desires. Well, think again. I want to share a clever technique I’ve been using for several months now to drastically improve the conversion rates of some of my projects. [...]
Read More »Category : Blog &Conversion Rate Optimization &Keyword Research &Paid Search
An Active Mindset: 100 new RSS subscribers and the power of endorsements
November 20th, 2007 @ Hamlet Batista // 19 Comments
Everybody in the search marketing industry has fallen head over heels for social media. Certainly it’s nice to see those traffic spikes in your website stats. Personally, I see social media as excellent for viral marketing, branding and long-term relationship building. But I don’t see that new visitors coming to a site from social media [...]
Read More »Category : Affiliate Marketing &Blog &Social Media Marketing
A World of Bugs and Logs: Advanced Web Analytics
November 19th, 2007 @ Hamlet Batista // 7 Comments
As search marketers we need to know if our efforts are paying off. How many visitors are we getting? What channels are they coming from? And more importantly, how many of those visitors are taking the action (conversions) that we want them to take? For all this information, we rely on Web Analytics. There are [...]
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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 [...]
Read More »Category : Blog &Competitive Intelligence &On-page SEO
