Long tail vs fat head optimization strategies – Part 2
By Hamlet Batista at August 22, 2007 | 2:34 pm | 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
Categotries : Blog , On-page SEO
Long tail vs fat head optimization strategies – Part 1
By Hamlet Batista at August 15, 2007 | 9:41 pm | 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
Categotries : Blog , On-page SEO
Adolescent Search Engines: They are growing up so fast!
By Hamlet Batista at August 15, 2007 | 6:30 pm | 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
Categotries : Blog , On-page SEO
The Truth About Sitelinks: Site structure is splendid, it seems
By Hamlet Batista at August 9, 2007 | 12:33 am | 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
Categotries : Blog , On-page SEO
Checkmate: Strategic vs Tactical SEO
By Hamlet Batista at August 2, 2007 | 10:25 am | 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
Categotries : Blog , On-page SEO
Controlling Your Robots: Using the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header with Googlebot
By Hamlet Batista at August 1, 2007 | 6:44 pm | 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
Categotries : Blog , On-page SEO , Technical SEO
The Power of Myth: Can a black-hat take down your rankings?
By Hamlet Batista at July 27, 2007 | 4:21 pm | 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
Categotries : Blog , Link Building
Rome Wasn’t Built in a Day—Neither is effective link building
By Hamlet Batista at July 25, 2007 | 4:01 pm | 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
Categotries : Blog , Link Building
The Ranking Triathlon: How to overcome crawling, indexing, and searching hurdles
By Hamlet Batista at July 23, 2007 | 6:44 pm | 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.
Categotries : Blog , On-page SEO
Content is King, but Duplicate Content is a Royal Pain.
By Hamlet Batista at July 19, 2007 | 8:47 pm | 12 Comments
Duplicate content is one of the most common causes of concern among webmasters. We work hard to provide original and useful content, and all it takes is a malicious SERP (Search Engine Results Page) hijacker to copy our content and use it for his or her own. Not nice. More troubling still is the way
Categotries : Blog , On-page SEO
