Is your business locally owned and operated? Do you only target specific states, cities, or neighborhoods? If so, you’re hopefully working hard on your website and web presence. That’s great! We love local businesses at Portent, and we’d like to help you out. Here are 3 quick and easy steps that you can take to [...]

Search engine results have changed dramatically. Today, which websites get top rankings depend on very different signals than in the past. So much so that what we once considered the whole of SEO is now only a small portion. Here are some of the factors affecting search engine optimization today. On-Site SEO On-site SEO includes [...]

Would you be surprised to learn that I’ve been writing Google Search+ recommendations and how-to guides for Portent clients this week? I plan to share my findings here on the blog, but before I dive into the new stuff I feel that it is important to cover some old ground first. Have you laid a [...]

I am not a fan of using keyword density for SEO. It’s been long and many a winter since search engines cared about how often a word or phrase appears on a page in relation to the quantity of other words. Today, Google and Bing care far more about natural language patterns. This means the [...]

At the risk of stating the obvious, when using social media for SEO, remember the SEO. While I am not going to name names, I watch a lot of SEO and social media campaigns and I’ve noticed something happening among my agency brethren. They post on Twitter and Facebook. They publish infographics or other link [...]

November 2012 is more than a year away, but White House and congressional contenders are already hitting the campaign trail. It’s typically easier for local incumbents to gain re-election than it is for outsiders to be elected. This is because familiarity breeds trust. The same applies to marketing, if you already have an affiliation with [...]

Lots of shopping sites have product feeds. Product feeds are a way to give other websites and search engines a list of what you sell. For example, you would use a product feeds to tell Google which items you want listed in their product search. These can appear in Google Shopping or in the universal [...]

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 [...]

SEOs love their tools. New tools can provide important new insights, never before possible. (However, we must remember – the tools are only as smart as the user. Tools give you leverage – you must supply the motion.) Here are 4 under the radar SEO tools I learned about at SMX: Chartbeat What it is: [...]

A complete SEO keyword research strategy. All the steps you need to make great keyword charts.