Is your business locally owned and operated? Do you only target specific states, cities, or neighborhoods? If so, you’re hopefully working hard on your website and web presence. That’s great! We love local businesses at Portent, and we’d like to help you out. Here are 3 quick and easy steps that you can take to [...]

Search engine results have changed dramatically. Today, which websites get top rankings depend on very different signals than in the past. So much so that what we once considered the whole of SEO is now only a small portion. Here are some of the factors affecting search engine optimization today. On-Site SEO On-site SEO includes [...]

Would you be surprised to learn that I’ve been writing Google Search+ recommendations and how-to guides for Portent clients this week? I plan to share my findings here on the blog, but before I dive into the new stuff I feel that it is important to cover some old ground first. Have you laid a [...]

Learning to use Camtasia, so I recorded this quick video. If you’re new to SEO, this is the ‘SEO 101′ look at the title tag, why it matters, and best practices for using it:

(In case you’re wondering, ‘percentile die’ let you roll any number from 1-100.) Feel free to embed this, using this code: By Conversation Marketing Explanation In most role-playing games (think Dungeons & Dragons), there are these things called random encounters. Every now and then, a die roll determines whether you get eaten by a troll, [...]

I wrote a post, and this time lots of folks taught me good stuff. See the comments after the post for great info I’d totally forgotten on how Google calculates site performance Google, I’m very… disappointed. You may have noticed that Conversation Marketing is a wee bit more speedy now. Last week, a page on [...]

SEO is complicated, and it’s easy to fall for a ripoff artist, or someone who’s just clueless. But there are some easy ways to detect SEO buttheads. Here’s how you can tell if someone making big promises is utterly full of horse manure: 1: The spam e-mail Butthead indicator #1: The unsolicited e-mail. Strength: 2/5 [...]

I got to participate in the ‘Future of Search’ panel today at the Seattle Interactive Conference. Two subjects came up that I must expand on a bit: My car This is my car. It is a Buick Regal Turbo. It is awesome: OK, now that that’s done with. What scares me about the future of [...]

Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate’s life for me. Going black hat. It’s so tempting. You put in all this time researching SEO. You know as much about the algorithms as anyone. You watch competitors zip past you and you just know they’re cheating. How else could they zip past you*? *I dunno… Maybe because [...]

I am not a fan of using keyword density for SEO. It’s been long and many a winter since search engines cared about how often a word or phrase appears on a page in relation to the quantity of other words. Today, Google and Bing care far more about natural language patterns. This means the [...]