In charge of building your first PPC account? Don’t have a lot of time or money to spend within AdWords? Well you came to the right place. Over the course of the next six weeks, Portent PPC Strategists Chad Kearns and Tim Johnson will be laying down the knowledge in a six-part blog series detailing [...]

We’ve all seen it happen. An employee is doing killer work, initiating great ideas, and displaying a willingness to take on larger projects. The employee is quickly promoted to a manager position. But while this top employee has excelled at the tactical parts of the job, he or she has never managed a team before. [...]

When I meet with clients or present at conferences, I am always asked: “How do I rank high on Google for (insert keyword-phrase-du-jour)?” I give the standard answer: “Only the search engineers and Google can tell you and they aren’t talking.” Inevitably, the questioner looks dejected, mutters a slur on my credentials, and walks away.  [...]

In charge of building your first PPC account? Don’t have a lot of time or money to spend within AdWords? Well you came to the right place. Over the course of the next six weeks, Portent PPC Strategists Chad Kearns and Tim Johnson will be laying down the knowledge in a six-part blog series detailing [...]

We write about a lot of fancy stuff on the Portent blog, such as server log analysis, advanced keyword research, and Tom Cruise. I want to address something that doesn’t have to be fancy: site speed. We’ve written two posts on how we configured Portent’s site: one is pretty advanced and the other is blindingly [...]

Conventional wisdom dictates that working in teams is often the best way to accomplish a task. Many hands make light work, a bundle of sticks cannot be broken, etc. Particularly with large, complex projects, there is just no way one person can accomplish everything on their own. We can’t possibly know everything, or be experts [...]

It seems like every other day, some SEO technique that used to be accepted is now being devalued or, even worse, penalized. (Remember when meta keywords and nofollow tags were totally legit?  Ah, the good old days…)  And now Google is threatening to crack down on two staples of the SEO stable: anchor text and [...]

Even if you have zero interest in programming or SEO, I’m convinced you’re going to be glad you decided to read this blog post. And to make it a total no-brainer for you, I’m offering a 100% money back guarantee.  Sound good?  Keep reading. Hello, I’m David and I’m a wanna-be geek Sometime around Y2K, [...]

So you’ve realized the benefits of having a kick-ass blog. Now what are you going to say on that blog? You could go the route of taking all that carefully-prepared corporate branding, and using your blog to put out press releases about things that you want your customers to care about (but really only matter [...]

As you may already know, we’re a little obsessed with page load speed. We wanted our home page to load in under 1 second, and we were close. But close isn’t good enough. So, with some guidance from Ian, I started out on my quest for sub 1 second page load times. The journey took [...]