SEO Blog Posts

SEO

Update: Word vectors are a legitimate thing!!!!! I’m not saying you should ignore them. I’m saying there’s plenty of ways to take word vectors into account in your SEO approach, without diving down into Python and natural language processing. I’m also saying that many industry experts (term used advisedly) are talking about this concept without… Read More

SEO

Robots.txt is a small text file that lives in the root directory of a website. It tells well-behaved crawlers whether to crawl certain parts of the site or not. The file uses simple syntax to be easy for crawlers to put in place (which makes it easy for webmasters to put in place, too). Write… Read More

SEO

Pssssst! Hey, you! Want to know the best way to drive a client crazy? Talk. A lot. But tell them nothing. The SEO industry has a lot of people who are really, really good at that. We’ve seen some true artists; men and women who can speak or write thousands of words without uttering a… Read More

SEO

Whether you’re thinking about starting a company, revamping your current business, adding a new product line, or just making sure your current SEO approach is on the right track, keyword research is a fundamental part of the process. The reason keyword research is so indispensable is that it’s one of the easiest ways to get… Read More

SEO

SearchFest 2016 (aka the last “SearchFest”) had a load of great talks, but only a few were as immediately relevant to my work as the deep dive discussion of structured and unstructured data from AJ Kohn and Mike Arnesen. They lent great insight to my approach to these two different types of information, and deepened… Read More

SEO

More coming (including links), but here’s the slide deck from today’s Resonate presentation: Amazon and Google: SEO Priorities from Ian Lurie The links These are some of the resources I mentioned in the presentation. If you don’t see one, let me know. Keyword and competitive analysis MerchantWords Amazon keyword search data AnswerThePublic Keyword and question… Read More

SEO

A Quick & Dirty Google Index Diagnostic This article outlines a simple diagnostic technique to assess the health of your site architecture. For all the current attention being paid to Content (caps intentional), our ability to generate organic traffic still depends heavily on that content being found and indexed by a search engine’s crawlers.  … Read More

SEO

If search engines can’t crawl your site, SEO efforts do not amount to much. One of the problems I see most often are ‘spider traps’. Traps kill crawls and hurt indexation. Here’s how you find and fix them: What is a spider trap? A spider trap is a structural issue that causes a web crawler… Read More

SEO

Or, “How I Became a Certified Jedi Knight” Yay! Star Wars! I can’t wait for The Force Awakens! It comes out in a couple weeks and I have totally bought into the hype. I know I’m not alone, even after a certain late-nineties, floppy-eared, backward knee-walking, CGI disappointment, who shall remain nameless. Now here’s the… Read More

Internet Marketing

No. Epilogue All hail RankBrain! Remember this day when we’re all slaves to machines that barf information on us, filling up downtime and turning us into drooling screen addicts… Wait. Since I’m too late to do anything about that, I thought I’d get one thing out of the way: RankBrain doesn’t matter to marketers. Or… Read More

SEO

In the wake of Google’s Mobile-Friendly update (occasionally referred to as “Mobilegeddon“) many marketers are wondering how their sites were impacted. In this Portent U Webinar, we discussed how you can see whether or not your site was impacted by the mobile-friendly update, identify mobile traffic opportunities, troubleshoot common mobile problems, and put together an… Read More

SEO

As a CEO and father, I’m an expert on anxiety. So I understand why Google’s mobile search algorithm update (aka Mobilegeddon) has CEOs and marketing teams popping Xanax. Before you reach for the prescription, though, do this test. It’ll help you figure out if you need to take action. Then, keep reading to see your… Read More

SEO

I’ve noticed there’s something we’re sorely missing in our marketing mix: flowcharts. Making sure that Portent has mo’ flo’ to offer has become of my new life goals. As part of this endeavor, I created the following International SEO Strategy flowchart to help those who are trying to decide what the best structure is for… Read More

Internet Marketing

I read the news today, oh boy. No doubt, many of you have already read the headline from TechCrunch. Or maybe you caught it coming down off the mountain from Google. Google is formalizing its stance on “mobile-friendliness” as a ranking signal worldwide. Not only that, but they’re boosting content from indexed apps in organic… Read More

SEO

SEMPDX invited me to talk penalties at Searchfest 2015 (You should attend 2016, by the way). Here’s my presentation, with some extra explanatory slides: Bear in mind that the data in here was generated by me, a History major w/ a law degree. So treat them with a healthy grain of salt. You can rely… Read More