Featured

I’ve prattled on about the marketing stack for a few years now, but haven’t really explained each chunk. This 5-post series explains the stack as a whole, then piece-by-piece. I’m not some TV series jerk who will keep you hanging, though, wondering which of your favorite characters will die next (cough HBO cough cough). Instead,… Read More

Social Media

Hi. My name is Sara, and I’m a Facebook Insights junkie. I was getting my latest fix yesterday, while trying to figure out an explanation for a client’s relatively high rate of Facebook page unlikes that we detected in August. Yes, we use tools for this stuff; but we also still dive deep into the… Read More

For three years, I got to work in an awesome professional setting at Portent. Sure, the office space wasn’t as nice when I first started in the outskirts of Seattle as it is now downtown. But that didn’t change the fact that I became part of a close-knit community which thrives in the office environment… 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

While we do love SEO, PPC, social, content, and Internet marketing in general, we’re more than that – we’re also people, people who love our pets. (I mean, we love them so much we built an entire Facebook app called the Kitten Moodinator.) So for this fun, furry, Friday post I present The Pets of… Read More

Social Media

I seem to be unflinchingly attracted to disciplines where you rarely see a front-page story about a just-plain-good day. I grew up in the equestrian world, a sport where the only television footage you see from the Olympics is of horses tumbling over jumps and riders falling all asunder.  I’ve also been shaped by my… Read More

Video

Sometimes we’re in meeting or on calls with clients and we catch our colleagues saying something worth sharing. So we created the “Portent Pop Quiz” series where we ambush the Portentite and have them drop a quick knowledge bomb about a random subject. In this one George Freitag addresses why you should delay posting your… Read More

Copywriting

Yes, blogging is fun. Anyone who enjoys long-form writing can have a field day extolling the virtues of a product or (even better) building authority with significant posts that address the needs of your audience. But if you think your content only lives on your blog, you’re missing something. I can think of seven other… Read More

Internet Marketing

Being a new mom is pretty awesome. Sure, there’s lack of sleep, lots of crying (you and the baby), and lots of diapers. But there are also awesome smiles, giggles, cuddles, and hugs.  It’s challenging enough to accommodate this new person, but working full-time adds an extra layer. Over the years, however, I’ve developed some… Read More

Analytics

You’ve heard the saying “content is king!” so many times by now that it’s become a joke. A joke that isn’t funny and doesn’t even accurately depict the real role of content. Content is what your visitors see when they come to your site. It’s how you engage with them. It is the key to… Read More

Internet Marketing

I’m writing another humungous post about this presentation, given during today’s Portent U webinar. For now, though, here are the slides: Distance from Perfect: Internet Marketing in 2013 from Ian Lurie Enjoy!

Analytics

If you’re on this site and you’re a blogger, chances are you’ve already read a few dozen articles about how great Google Analytics is. And they’re all right. You should absolutely use Google Analytics. It’s free, incredibly versatile, and chock-full of useful data about what people are doing on your site. The only problem is… Read More

Internet Marketing

I went a little nuts here. I started writing a short ‘how-to’ post on content audits. Then it turned into a longer post on content strategy. Then it became a mini-infographic. It ended up being a top-to-bottom guide on how we do content strategies at Portent. We put it into a custom format so it’s… 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

Internet Marketing

We are over halfway through 2013, so we thought we’d glance back at some of our top Portent blog posts of the year (so far).  This was no easy selection — we are very fortunate to have a plethora of great content to choose from. The following posts were chosen based on social impact, traffic… Read More