Ian Lurie

Articles by Ian Lurie

Ian Lurie is founder and CEO of Portent Inc., an internet marketing agency that has provided internet marketing, including PPC, SEO, social and analytics services, since 1995. more >

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tbod

IA, UX and SEO – my presentation

Last night I gave a presentation at the Seattle IA/UX meetup. Good pizza, plus I got to say ‘toilet bowl of death,’ which is one of my favorite phrases. IA, UX and SEO from Ian Lurie I know IA/UX and SEO are supposed to hate each other. What I don’t know is why. We’re all [...]

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clean up after your links, k?

Are my links poopy? Know a spammy link when you see one.

Short version of this article: If you’ve been penalized for unnatural links by Google, either manually or under Penguin, you need to cut deep or you won’t recover. Now, the long version, with examples: Here’s a joke I learned in hebrew school, an unmentionable number of decades ago: Three guys are walking down the sidewalk. [...]

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as it turns out, this gets my feet wet

Stupiphanies: Lessons for leaders

Every now and then I have these epiphanies so blindingly obvious that, when I point them out, people look at me like I’m a hapless dolt. I call these ‘stupiphanies.’ Most of mine relate to leadership, either as a parent or a CEO. A few I’ve had in the last month are particularly worth sharing: [...]

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phew - we made it

Advertising should

Marketing is what we do. Advertising is what we often make as a result. It sounds very fulfilling. Alas, the process usually looks something like this: The marketing team builds out brilliant messaging and brand story. They brainstorm some nifty ideas. Then, they pull together a completely incomprehensible collection of marketing platitudes creative brief around [...]

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pest

LinkedIn Search May Need Some Help

I love LinkedIn, but either someone’s playing a joke on me, or my kids are getting to have a say in their rankings, or something’s really wrong. I currently rank number one for the word ‘pest’: For ‘internet marketing,’ on the other hand, I’m not even in the top 10. My daughter just said, when [...]

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shiny-happy-search-result

Cartoons outperform stock photos 2:1

I curse whoever first wrote “Have an image at the top of your blog post.” Ever since then it’s been a barrage of crappy stock photos slapped at the top of every half-assed blog post across the internet. Take this example. Am I supposed to believe there’s an company in the world that has this [...]

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poster-internetmarketingstartups

Internet marketing for startups: The presentation

This is the somewhat annotated version of a talk I gave at this fantastic incubator here in Seattle called SURF. My main point: Marketing isn’t about interruption, trickery, SEO spam, etc. Marketing is about communicating true value and significance to your audience. Period. Anything else is just annoying. A brief expository interlude In 1992, I [...]

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poster

Time management for internet marketers

You can learn to manage your time, or you can end each day curled up in a ball under your desk. At least, those were my choices. I never found a pre-conceived time management system that worked for me as an internet marketer. GTD, Pomodoro, etc. all have great elements but couldn’t quite fit the [...]

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38 Holiday e-commerce tips: The slides (annotated)

I’m prepping for my Vocus webinar (can’t wait!) today at 11 Pacific. These are the slides I put together, with annotations: I’ll be going into more detail, though, so make it to the webinar if you can!

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social-thumb

The social candidacy: The elections Facebook influenced

Or, if you’re a Republican: “What the hell just happened?!” The election was supposed to be close. Regardless of your party affiliation, you heard that for months: Maybe an electoral tie. Certainly with one candidate winning the electoral college and the other the popular vote. We wouldn’t know for days after November 6th… Oops. The [...]

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