SEO

This is an hour-by-hour, day-by-day narration of Portent’s time in the Google Penalty box. If you want to read in order, read from the bottom up. While our time under penalty was very short, the lessons are good ones. We did the same work for ourselves that we’d do for other clients, with the exception… Read More

SEO

“Not Provided” is old news by now, and most SEOs have learned lots of different keyword discovery strategies. There are costly solutions like mining paid traffic and using third party tools, or just plain complicated tactics like correlating ranking data with organic landing page traffic. These are all great and people absolutely should continue using… Read More

SEO

Unlike Orange is the New Black or 60 is the new 40, this adage is true. UX is the new way to optimize sites for search engines because Google said so. Yes, that benign search giant has decided that links are no longer as important as they once thought. Out of deep concern for its… Read More

SEO

There are LOTS of people out there that don’t understand what SEO is and how you do it. I wish I had a dollar for every time I was told to go do my “SEO magic” by a client. These same people are hungry to see results to make sure that you are actually doing… Read More

SEO

The SEO community and the web development community can often be at odds. One thing they’ll both agree on, however, is the importance of performance. The SEO’s favorite site speed tool is Google’s PageSpeed Insights, which I’ve written about before. We’ve all seen this among the suggestions: CSS sprites. One tactic to improve site speed… Read More

SEO

If you haven’t already, I’d love it if you would read Matt Cutts’s The decay and fall of guest blogging for SEO post to understand the context of my post. “Back in the day, guest blogging used to be a respectable thing, much like getting a coveted, respected author to write the introduction of your… Read More

SEO

I don’t know about you, but sometimes I wonder who writes up the documentation for Google. When they first announced the rel=author tag and Authorship configuration procedure on one of Google’s 11 blogs that I subscribe to, I jumped right on it and devoured the information and the process they described. Then I read it… Read More

SEO

SEO is about attracting non-paid search traffic to your website. The idea is that a person searches the Web using Bing or Google, etc. and your site comes up in the non-paid search results. To that end, it’s important to make sure your website is easily understood by both people and machines. People = your… Read More

SEO

To many people’s minds, search engine optimization is on par with direct mail, telemarketing, and Katherine Heigl. (Well, maybe not Heigl-bad…) As Brand Manager of Portent, one of my ongoing directives is to gather case studies of our good work. But unlike conventional agencies who regularly tout their big marketing wins, I often have a… Read More

SEO

One of my favorite comedy bits is Lewis Black educating us on the difference between milk and water. Black tells us that there is no such thing as soy milk because soy beans do not have breasts (from which milk comes). Soy milk is a made-up name to sell a product. “Link juice” – a… Read More

SEO

Well it finally happened. In what they claim is a move to make search data more secure, Google has begun to encrypt all searches, effectively placing all organic traffic into the (not provided) category. This means business owners will never see the keywords people used to get to their site. We’ve already gone over what… Read More

SEO

I read the news today, oh boy… Danny Sullivan announced that Google is actively moving towards 100% encrypted search results. This should come as no surprise to anyone in the industry. When Google introduced secure search back in 2011, we saw the writing on the wall. As Google increased their number of users, the number… Read More

SEO

Do you ever feel like the ideas or the topics you want to focus on fall on deaf ears with your SEO specialist?  Do they appear to favor seemingly trivial or invisible items like title or alt tags, navigation, and site speed, over keywords and rankings that feel more directly related to meeting your goals?… Read More

SEO

The days of sanitary SEO are on the wane. Oh sure, there will always be tools to hide behind and technology barriers to raise. As long as site speed is a factor, we will be able to amuse ourselves in the solitary pursuits of caching, minifying, and optimizing consolidated JS and CSS files and images.… Read More

SEO

Last month, I did a webinar called “Everything Non-SEOs Need To Know About SEO.” The goal was to give developers, designers, and other web professionals a core understanding of some of the more complex SEO concepts. Here’s the full video along with the link bundle that includes the slidedeck. Enjoy! You can find the link… Read More