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 [...]

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 [...]

Pin It “The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” -Mark Twain It’s been said that SEO is dead. It’s been said a lot, actually. But no, this is not another dumb, disguised, fake controversy “death of SEO” linkbait article. No. This is a fun, full-disclosure, zero-controversy death of SEO linkbait article. Now that you’re done [...]

If you missed today’s webinar, “SEO: 50 tips in 50 minutes,” you can get the slides here: SEO: 50 tips in 50 minutes View more presentations from Ian Lurie And, if you don’t mind giving us your e-mail address (mwahahahahahahahaha) you can get the entire recording, here: http://webinar.portent.com/webinar-vid-request/ While the Portent team and myself may [...]

When I wrote these exam questions, I have to admit, I didn’t think about publishing the answers. It seemed kind of… wrong. But then I thought about the havoc wreaked if all kids had the teachers’ answer keys (obscure Simpsons reference there). And I smiled in a way that makes my family nervous. So, the [...]

I’m working on a set of SEO test questions at my company. The objective: Figure out each SEO analyst’s strengths and weaknesses, then tailor training to them. I thought I’d share a few. They’re supposed to start off pretty easy and get more difficult: TRUE or FALSE or BOTH: The ‘nofollow’ attribute is good for [...]

Google Search Plus Your World builds organic search traffic, big-time. Say what you want about the evil-ness of the whole thing. It’s a huge opportunity, and you need to capitalize on it now. The background I’ve been working for several weeks, researching what seems to get your Plus profile showing up in organic search results—also [...]