Guides on SEO, GEO and AI search, AI in marketing, WordPress and conversion.https://www.hamed.de/enhttps://www.hamed.de/en/geo-vs-seo/https://www.hamed.de/en/geo-vs-seo/SEO gets your website ranking high in the search results of Google and Bing. GEO (generative engine optimisation) gets AI systems such as ChatGPT, Gemini or Google AI Overviews to use your content as a source and mention your company. Both rest on the same foundation – and in most cases you need both, with SEO as the base.Thu, 21 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThamed@hamed.de (Hamed Farhadian)https://www.hamed.de/en/how-to-get-visible-in-chatgpt/https://www.hamed.de/en/how-to-get-visible-in-chatgpt/You’re visible in ChatGPT when it mentions your company for relevant questions or links to your website as a source. You can’t buy your way in: visibility comes from content that answers questions clearly, consistent information about your company, mentions on other websites and a site that OpenAI’s crawler is allowed to read.Thu, 21 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThamed@hamed.de (Hamed Farhadian)https://www.hamed.de/en/optimize-for-google-ai-overviews/https://www.hamed.de/en/optimize-for-google-ai-overviews/Google AI Overviews are AI-generated summaries above the search results that combine content from several websites and link to some of them. To appear there as a source you don’t need special technology – you need indexable pages with a clear structure, precise answers, original insight and demonstrable expertise.Thu, 21 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThamed@hamed.de (Hamed Farhadian)https://www.hamed.de/en/create-content-with-ai/https://www.hamed.de/en/create-content-with-ai/Good AI-assisted content doesn’t come from a single prompt. It comes from four phases: a detailed brief, an outline, writing section by section and a thorough human review. That way ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude become a sparring partner – and you get copy that holds up on Google and in AI search.Thu, 04 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMThamed@hamed.de (Hamed Farhadian)https://www.hamed.de/en/meta-description-examples/https://www.hamed.de/en/meta-description-examples/A meta description is the short summary shown below the title in Google’s search results. It isn’t a direct ranking factor, but it helps decide whether people click on your result. A good meta description is about 120 to 155 characters long, unique to the page, and includes the keyword, a concrete benefit and a clear call to action.Wed, 20 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMThamed@hamed.de (Hamed Farhadian)https://www.hamed.de/en/why-customers-buy/https://www.hamed.de/en/why-customers-buy/Buying motives are the reasons customers choose one offer over another. Five rational motives come up again and again: price, selection, quality, convenience and personalisation. You don’t have to excel at all five – pick the one advantage that sets you apart from the competition and make it visible everywhere.Thu, 07 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMThamed@hamed.de (Hamed Farhadian)https://www.hamed.de/en/website-relaunch/https://www.hamed.de/en/website-relaunch/A website relaunch is the rebuild of an existing website with a new design, new technology or a new structure. To keep your rankings, you need three things before launch: an inventory of every URL that gets traffic, a complete redirect map and a plan for carrying over content, title tags and internal links. I run relaunches in two phases: analysis and concept first, then build and monitoring.Tue, 18 Jun 2024 00:00:00 GMThamed@hamed.de (Hamed Farhadian)https://www.hamed.de/en/leave-your-comfort-zone/https://www.hamed.de/en/leave-your-comfort-zone/Your comfort zone is the space where you feel safe because you know every routine. It’s important for recharging, but stay in it too long and you lose the ability to handle new situations – and, as an entrepreneur, your capacity to innovate. I step out of mine deliberately with small dares, such as a comfort zone challenge.Mon, 18 Mar 2024 00:00:00 GMThamed@hamed.de (Hamed Farhadian)https://www.hamed.de/en/improve-google-pagespeed-insights/https://www.hamed.de/en/improve-google-pagespeed-insights/Google PageSpeed Insights is a free Google tool that measures how fast a page loads and suggests specific fixes. What Google really cares about isn’t the 0–100 score but the Core Web Vitals of real users: LCP within 2.5 seconds, INP within 200 milliseconds and CLS of 0.1 or less. The biggest levers are almost always images, caching and too much JavaScript.Fri, 30 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMThamed@hamed.de (Hamed Farhadian)https://www.hamed.de/en/seo-keyword-research/https://www.hamed.de/en/seo-keyword-research/You find good keywords with a mix of free Google sources and keyword tools: Google Autocomplete and Search Console show what people actually search for, while tools such as Google Keyword Planner or KWFinder add search volume and competition. What matters in the end isn’t the highest search volume but the buying intent behind a term.Mon, 19 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMThamed@hamed.de (Hamed Farhadian)https://www.hamed.de/en/seo-for-managing-directors/https://www.hamed.de/en/seo-for-managing-directors/As a CEO or business owner you don’t need to do SEO yourself, but you do need to understand and steer it. The key decisions aren’t technical: which search terms you want to be found for, which customer need sits behind them, and who owns content and the technical side together. If you hand that off without being able to judge the results, you’re working with a black box.Sat, 10 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMThamed@hamed.de (Hamed Farhadian)https://www.hamed.de/en/the-truth-about-seo-agencies/https://www.hamed.de/en/the-truth-about-seo-agencies/You can recognise a trustworthy SEO agency by the way it explains every step, backs up results with real figures, never guarantees rankings and involves you as the client. Dubious providers sell “number one on Google”, keep their methods secret and lock you into long contracts. Your best protection is knowing enough about SEO to have a say.Mon, 22 May 2023 00:00:00 GMThamed@hamed.de (Hamed Farhadian)https://www.hamed.de/en/strato-website-builder-seo-review/https://www.hamed.de/en/strato-website-builder-seo-review/My experience with the Strato website builder comes from a client project: the site looked good but was hard to find on Google because every subpage had the same H1 heading. A workaround fixed it in half an hour. Today the Strato builder offers its own SEO settings for title, description and URL on each page – but you should still check your headings yourself.Wed, 17 May 2023 00:00:00 GMThamed@hamed.de (Hamed Farhadian)https://www.hamed.de/en/startup-walk-talk-hamburg/https://www.hamed.de/en/startup-walk-talk-hamburg/Startup Walk & Talk is a networking meetup in Hamburg: we walk just under 8 kilometres around the Alster lake together and switch conversation partners every 10 minutes. I started it in 2016, growing out of my own Wednesday walk. According to the Meetup group, it still meets on Wednesdays at 7pm at the AlsterCliff (as of October 2026).Sun, 13 Feb 2022 00:00:00 GMThamed@hamed.de (Hamed Farhadian)https://www.hamed.de/en/google-ranking-factors/https://www.hamed.de/en/google-ranking-factors/Google assesses pages using hundreds of signals, and there’s no complete official list. In 2026 four areas carry the most weight: how well a page matches search intent, how helpful and trustworthy its content is, how many respected sites link to it and how users interact with it. Technical factors such as load time are a prerequisite but rarely decide rankings on their own.Sun, 03 May 2020 00:00:00 GMThamed@hamed.de (Hamed Farhadian)https://www.hamed.de/en/call-to-action-examples/https://www.hamed.de/en/call-to-action-examples/Good call-to-action copy names the outcome, not the action: “Get my quote” instead of “Submit”. It’s short, specific and removes the visitor’s biggest worry before the click. Below you’ll find my rules, examples for every goal and the button labels I no longer use.Sat, 07 Mar 2020 00:00:00 GMThamed@hamed.de (Hamed Farhadian)https://www.hamed.de/en/link-building-for-startups/https://www.hamed.de/en/link-building-for-startups/Link building is the deliberate work of getting other websites to link to yours. For startups, relevance matters far more than volume: one link from a customer, partner, trade portal or industry publication does more than a hundred bought ones. It works best when you have content or a story that others actually want to cite.Thu, 11 Jul 2019 00:00:00 GMThamed@hamed.de (Hamed Farhadian)https://www.hamed.de/en/is-wordpress-best-for-seo/https://www.hamed.de/en/is-wordpress-best-for-seo/WordPress is a very good choice for SEO if you publish regularly, several people work on the site and you want plugins like Yoast SEO or Rank Math. It isn’t automatically the best choice: for smaller sites that mainly need to be fast and low-maintenance, a static site generator is often the better fit. That’s why, after many years on WordPress, I moved hamed.de to Astro in 2026.Mon, 27 May 2019 00:00:00 GMThamed@hamed.de (Hamed Farhadian)https://www.hamed.de/en/interview-matt-mullenweg/https://www.hamed.de/en/interview-matt-mullenweg/At WordCamp Europe 2014 in Sofia I put my questions to Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress and founder of Automattic. The video runs about 15 minutes and is embedded below. Underneath you’ll find who Matt Mullenweg is, what a WordCamp is and how I see WordPress today.Wed, 01 May 2019 00:00:00 GMThamed@hamed.de (Hamed Farhadian)https://www.hamed.de/en/buy-or-sell-a-website-project/https://www.hamed.de/en/buy-or-sell-a-website-project/Selling a website project is harder than most people think: its value lies in revenue, traffic and code that a buyer can barely verify. Three hurdles decide every deal – trust, a realistic valuation and code that can be handed over. I know both sides, because I have bought and sold web projects myself.Fri, 19 Apr 2019 00:00:00 GMThamed@hamed.de (Hamed Farhadian)https://www.hamed.de/en/what-is-seo/https://www.hamed.de/en/what-is-seo/SEO (search engine optimisation) is everything you do to make your website appear high up on Google for the searches your customers make – without paying for ads. It works by improving three things: the technical side, so Google can read your pages; your content, so it answers searchers’ questions better than anyone else; and outside trust, through links and mentions.Sun, 07 Apr 2019 00:00:00 GMThamed@hamed.de (Hamed Farhadian)https://www.hamed.de/en/slow-wordpress-website/https://www.hamed.de/en/slow-wordpress-website/A slow WordPress site usually comes down to five causes: a bloated theme, too many or poorly coded plugins, underpowered hosting, too many third-party scripts and sometimes simply your own internet connection while testing. To speed up WordPress, check these one by one, then add caching, optimised images and a current PHP version.Mon, 18 Feb 2019 00:00:00 GMThamed@hamed.de (Hamed Farhadian)https://www.hamed.de/en/wordpress-seo-guide/https://www.hamed.de/en/wordpress-seo-guide/WordPress SEO means optimising a WordPress website so it’s found on Google and in AI search for the right search terms. An SEO plugin such as Yoast SEO or Rank Math gives you the fields for title tags, meta descriptions and the sitemap. What you put in those fields, how fast the site loads and how well your content answers the query are what decide your rankings.Sun, 17 Feb 2019 00:00:00 GMThamed@hamed.de (Hamed Farhadian)https://www.hamed.de/en/fast-wordpress-hosting/https://www.hamed.de/en/fast-wordpress-hosting/Fast WordPress hosting is hosting where the servers, caching and software are tuned for WordPress, so your pages load without a wait. The easiest way to get it is managed WordPress hosting: the provider handles updates, backups and security for you. I have recommended the German host HostPress since 2018 – and I’ll be upfront that HostPress is also a client of mine.Wed, 04 Jul 2018 00:00:00 GMThamed@hamed.de (Hamed Farhadian)https://www.hamed.de/en/virtual-startups/https://www.hamed.de/en/virtual-startups/Virtual startups are businesses that exist only online: there’s no office and no shop, and ordering, payment and delivery run automatically through a website. Their advantages are low costs and a lot of freedom for founders. They need a web-based business model to work – I mainly used two: selling automated online services and earning from ads on content sites.Wed, 13 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMThamed@hamed.de (Hamed Farhadian)