Adding copy to your website can become a tug-o-war between the Branding and SEO teams. One side is representing the voice and tone of the brand.  At the other end of the rope, the SEO team is focused on increasing keyword rankings. This can lead to everyone walking away covered in mud. Avoid that unclean [...]

Here’s the video from Josh Patrice’s excellent SEO for small business webinar last week. Enjoy:

For the first time in what might be ever, Google has followed Bing’s lead and announced a tool to disavow links. We asked (or demanded), and they listened! Cleverly named the Disavow Links tool, Google Webmaster Tools’ latest feature gives power back to webmasters and takes it away from spammers. Here are our tips for [...]

I presented at Distilled’s Seattle SEO Meetup in September. My topic: Why link building is a lousy strategy, ‘content marketing’ as most marketers define it is just a way to sell more marketing books, and some reasonable alternatives. Here’s the annotated slide deck:

Who ya gonna call for local SEO help? By now, we hope it’s us. Two weeks ago we made an open call for questions related to Local Search. Since then, we’ve discussed the meat and potatoes of local SEO: offsite factors, social strategies and the fundamentals of local search. Now, to wrap up our Portent [...]

As we’ve discussed during the earlier parts of our Local Series, directories and social networks are vital to getting your business found online. Directories feed search engines the data that justifies your business’ inclusion in the local results. Social networks get the word out to your customers and let you connect with them online. But, [...]

For the second installment of the Portent Local Series, I’ll go over why and how directories affect local search visibility and where business owners should focus their time and energy. Local search is like a gyro sandwich: it’s delicious when it works, but the process and criteria for the result can be mysterious. What exactly is [...]

Last week we announced our new referral program for our PPC Essentials Package. There was a blog post about it. The world changed. We decided we really liked that feeling and wanted to hold onto it a little longer. So this week we’re announcing a special for our recently revamped and reworked Local SEO Package. For [...]

Demandware is a major e-commerce player in the fashion space. We’ve done SEO, site speed analysis and architecture on their system, and learned a thing or two on the way. First: Demandware is an awesome system. Like any enterprise e-commerce platform, it’s got its foibles. Like any enterprise software, its customers have a love/hate relationship [...]

“The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” -Proverb attributed to Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, if you can believe Wikipedia When the world wide interwebs came along, I was instantly intrigued. That was largely because when I was a (gullible) little kid I thought there was a book called “The Everything Book” that contained [...]