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.  [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

Have you ever tried to meet someone at Grand Central Station or some other incredibly crowded venue? It sounds so doable and yet it is so not. There are too many people, too many distractions and too much stuff in the way. App (tablet and phone applications) stores, both iTunes and Google Play Store have [...]

In the summer of 2012, the Rolling Stones celebrated the 50th anniversary of their first gig at the Marquee Club in London. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, the original bad boys of rock and roll have endured for a half century despite drug and alcohol problems, several changes to the band’s line-up, and occasional rumors [...]

Let me just start out with the ending. The Google Doc below takes a list of pages containing embedded YouTube or Vimeo videos and uses magic to grab all the data you need for a video XML sitemap. Then it makes the sitemap for you. You can have it by going to the link below [...]

Ever had a massive, life-changing epiphany? Me neither. However, I’ve slowly reached the conclusion that we’re doing SEO all wrong. Not in the do-real-marketing sense, or the we-need-to-change-the-name sense. More in the wow-did-we-ever-screw-the-pooch-this-time sense. After 17+ years of beating my head against walls like IT departments, branding teams and disbelieving CFOs, I’ve figured out why: [...]

Keyword research used to be so easy. You picked terms that the client wanted to rank high for, stuffed them onto the page, shake, bake and voila, the site is ranking in the top 3 search results for query. Bad SEOs stuffed keywords in all of the wrong places, all over the page, and in [...]

I just got off-stage after rambling about machine learning, link building and Penguin reinclusion requests. Nice long blog post coming right here, later, but for now, here are the slides: Machine learning and link spam – how hard can it be? from Ian Lurie And here’s a link to the link bundle: portent.co/machine-spam