This is one of those short posts that will make you squint your eyes slightly, furrow your brow, tilt your head, and say, “Wait, what? This doesn’t make sense.” Like this: I have an account in Google AdWords that has had a conversion metric calculation glitch. I first noticed it a few months ago when [...]

Lately, I’ve been feeling like a grade schooler punished along with the rest of the class for one student’s bad behavior. With Google’s Pandas, Penguins and other pandemonium-producing updates yet to come, we’re all Bart Simpson being forced to write on the SEO chalkboard, “I will not outsource link building to third-world countries that spam [...]

If I say ‘Google Penguin’ to an SEO pro, they shudder. In the SEO world, Google’s Penguin update is the nastiest, scariest update since, I dunno, Florida? Here’s an explainer for all the marketers who are wondering what the hell just happened to their traffic: What’s an update? The engineers at Google constantly tune their [...]

A few years ago I stepped into a role as an information architect and user experience designer at a Portland ad agency. Coming from a background in search marketing, this was quite a bit of a change for me. The first thing I noticed was that SEO & UX should really be a more integrated [...]

I’ve written other posts about hiring SEO firms: How to hire good ones. How to hire bad ones. But an update’s in order: Questionnaire for an SEO agency Start each agency you interview with 10 points. Add or subtract as indicated. Ask yourself: How did this firm get in touch with you? They cold-called or [...]

I remember when I got my first Twitter follower. I was a bright-eyed web surfer with a bushy tail (since birth). @getfree_ebooks3 followed me, and our relationship blossomed. She was beautiful. I would tell her about what I was eating for lunch and other important Twitter issues, and she would suggest nice pieces of malware [...]

You remember that episode where Homer Simpson goes into space as a NASA astronaut? He only got to go because Barney Gumble has an alcoholic relapse and Homer was the second runner up. Scientist: Well, Homer, I guess you’re the winner by default. Homer: Default? Woo hoo! The two sweetest words in the English language: [...]

Forbes published an article this week explaining why Google and Facebook could disappear in the next 5 years. I, uh, beg to differ. I wrote my thoughts on the subject in an article published on AllThingsD. You can read it here. Give it a read. I think Google will be around for a long, long [...]

For someone with only one head, I wear a lot of hats.  Most people have jobs they can explain in a sentence (“I’m a doctor / librarian / deep sea diver.”)  But I’m not one of those people: I’m an Account Strategist for Portent. As such, I find myself in all manner of situations, solving [...]

We’re all talking a lot about content and social media these days. But visibility boils down to technical SEO: Ensuring that search engines can easily find and categorize every page of your site. These are the top 4 I look at first when I’m auditing a site: 1: Check server response codes You can use [...]