On gurus, Google, and gaining marketshare: Leveraging your position as number one
August 6th, 2007 @ Hamlet Batista // 7 Comments
A lot of people read blogs, books, articles and other materials from so-called 'gurus' that made it big. Readers are hoping to do the same but I know that no one will match success by simply following a guru’s advice. I am not saying this because I think those gurus are necessarily dishonest or are [...]
Read More »Category : Affiliate Marketing &Blog &Paid Search
LinkingHood v0.2 – Find all your supplemental pages with ease
August 3rd, 2007 @ Hamlet Batista // One Comment
As it is well known by now, Google decided to remove the supplemental label from pages it adds to its supplemental index. That is unfortunate because pages that are labeled this way need some “link lovin’.” How are we going to give those pages the love they need if we are not able to identify [...]
Read More »Category : Blog &Technical SEO
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 [...]
Read More »Category : Blog &On-page SEO
Controlling Your Robots: Using the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header with Googlebot
August 1st, 2007 @ Hamlet Batista // 10 Comments
We have discussed before how to control Googlebot via robots.txt and meta robot tags. Both methods have limitations. With robots.txt you can block the crawling of any page or directory, but you cannot control the indexing, caching or snippets. With the robots meta tag you can control crawling, caching and snippets but you can only [...]
Read More »Category : Blog &On-page SEO &Technical SEO
Digg this: How to use social networking sites properly to boost traffic
July 30th, 2007 @ Hamlet Batista // 6 Comments
We all know that building solid, natural and authoritative links to your site or blog is the best way to obtain unshakable rankings. There has been a lot of chatter lately about using social networking sites to help build traffic and eventually links. Those links are hard to get, unless of course you have a [...]
Read More »Category : Blog &Link Building
The Power of Myth: Can a black-hat take down your rankings?
July 27th, 2007 @ Hamlet Batista // 8 Comments
My old pal Skitzzo from SEOrefugee revisits what he calls an SEO “myth”: that a competitor can potentially harm a site owner just by pointing links to his or her site. According to the number of Sphinns, it looks like a lot SEOs agree it’s a myth. That’s understandable, as it would be very unfair [...]
Read More »Category : Blog &Link Building
Avoiding the Bounce House: Optimizing your Search Marketing Campaign
July 26th, 2007 @ Hamlet Batista // 4 Comments
Getting solid rankings is a lot of work, and properly organizing keywords and landing pages is no trivial task either. Why not make the most out of it once you have started getting the traffic? After beginning a successful PPC or SEO campaign, it’s time to maximize the returns from it. There are a lot [...]
Read More »Category : Blog &Web Analytics
Rome Wasn’t Built in a Day—Neither is effective link building
July 25th, 2007 @ Hamlet Batista // 16 Comments
Link building is without a doubt the most time consuming—but most rewarding—aspect of search engine optimization. It usually takes more effort to promote your content (build links) than to actually create it. As I have stressed repeatedly before, compelling, useful content should make your link building efforts much easier. Before I go any further, let [...]
Read More »Category : Blog &Link Building
Tracing their Steps: How to track feed subscriber referrals with Google Analytics
July 24th, 2007 @ Hamlet Batista // 32 Comments
One of the most important measures of success for a blog is the number of RSS subscribers. There are many blog posts out there about how to increase your number of subscribers. They range from the use of bigger, more prominent and attention-grabbing RSS buttons, to offering bonuses for signing up. While you can use [...]
Read More »Category : Blog &Featured Posts &Web Analytics
The Ranking Triathlon: How to overcome crawling, indexing, and searching hurdles
July 23rd, 2007 @ Hamlet Batista // 3 Comments
I frequently get asked why a particular page is no longer ranking. I wish there were a simple answer to that question. Instead of giving personal responses, I’ve decided to write a detailed post with the possible problems that might cause your ranking to drop, as well as all the solutions I could think of. [...]
Read More »Category : Blog &On-page SEO
