Friends, SEOmans, eMad Men— LEND IAN YOUR EARS. Tomorrow at 10:30 a.m. (PST), Ian Lurie, CEO and Webfather of Portent, Inc., will give an exclusive webinar at SEOmoz.  His free-to-all-comers presentation “Data-Driven Content” will illuminate, educate, inform and otherwise rock your search marketing world.  (We hope.) Topics Ian will cover include: Why great content is [...]

This isn’t the proposal template we use. But it seems to be the one a lot of other folks use, and they’re all doing OK. So feel free to use this as your template: ========================================= To: Name of client From: Name of you Date: Hopefully today Dear Name of client: Generic introduction with pleasantries. Reference [...]

What are the first things you check after launching or re-launching a website? Here are seven things worth checking. Robots.txt Make certain that the search engines can visit and index your website. The blocking of search engines occurs more often than you may think. Developers disallow all spiders on the beta site then forget to [...]

Headings are for SEO Does your website use headings or h-tags for CSS design? It shouldn’t. Instead, reserve h-tags for outlining our document and SEO. Today the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog published this: One way Google’s algorithms determine the context of content on a page is by looking at the page’s headings. The way [...]

Technically this information isn’t strictly PPC, but it sure affects you if you are running or using a product feed for things like Product Extension Ads or Product Listing Ads and the feed suddenly disappears, disabling all your precious AdWords attributes and rendering the Auto Targets tab useless. Tragic, right? So here is a breakdown [...]

A metamorphosis is under way, one which will fundamentally change organic search engine rankings and search engine optimization. Google and Bing are getting faith in social media and are converting. Perhaps sooner than later, social media will eclipse backlinks as the gold standard for online authority. When Sergey and Brin created Google they invented PageRank, [...]

I just got back from SMX Advanced and boy are my arms tired. Actually, it’s my brain that’s feeling overwhelmed with lots of fresh insight and illuminating data. The cast and crew over at Third Door Media and Search Engine Land produced an exceptional event; they outdid themselves. Except, I left Seattle’s Bell Harbor conference [...]

Our good friends over at Hanapin Marketing – you know, the folks who run the PPC Hero blog – are running a pretty amazing SEM Sweepstakes right now. They have some great prizes available, including: (3) Paid Subscriptions to SEOMoz (1) 3-Month Subscription to ClickEquations (a neat bid management tool that we use at Portent) [...]

Today, a colleague asked me what I know about external links. Rather than simply e-mail her back I decided to sit down and answer this like I might if I were taking a college course exam. In other words a time limited brain dump. Let’s see how much I remember. :) A Little Foundation  InLink [...]

Google just updated their Toolbar PageRank, also known as the little green bar. Once again I am seeing a lot of web sites losing PageRank, so I want to re-share what I have counseled people in the past. If your rankings and traffic have not recently fallen, do not worry about your diminished PageRank. Visible [...]