Articles by George Freitag
George Freitag // 24 Feb, 2016
What My Failed Yard Sale Taught Me About Marketing
I’m a big fan of yard sales. Mostly because I’m a big fan of stuff; especially cheap stuff that barely works. But, as you can imagine, one of the consequences of being a fan of stuff is actually acquiring a lot of stuff so one day, after rummaging in my basement for an hour to… Read More
George Freitag // 24 Apr, 2015
30 Minute Audit: Mobile SEO [VIDEO WEBINAR]
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
George Freitag // 19 Nov, 2014
5 Ways Your Site Might Fail Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test
On Tuesday, Google announced a new label in search results that states whether or not a site is “mobile-friendly.” Now when you’re on your phone, you’ll know ahead of time if the site you’re thinking about visiting is optimized for your device. Accompanying that announcement, Google said that they are also experimenting with a ranking boost for sites… Read More
George Freitag // 30 Oct, 2014
Google’s Data Highlighter: Your New Favorite Backup Plan
We all know the importance of Schema markup and rich snippets on your search results. We’ve written about the importance of getting markup implemented on your web page and getting rich snippets showing in your search results. And you should. Schema markup is the best solution to getting rich snippets to show up in search… Read More
George Freitag // 4 Sep, 2014
Team Portent Bids Farewell to Authorship
One spring day of 2011, Google announced a new thing called “Authorship.” They described it as a way of using data to “help people find content from great authors in our search results.” With little exception, the SEO community rejoiced. Finally, we, the content creators and bloggers of the world, were on top. By adding… Read More
George Freitag // 1 Jul, 2014
Get on that Map: Local SEO Best Practices [VIDEO WEBINAR]
This webinar was given on June 19, 2014 Learn all about Local SEO best practices, including basic on-site SEO for businesses, business profiles, directory and citation providers, duplicate listings, reviews, and more in this free PortentU webinar. Watch the full video: Get the link bundle here. See just the slidedeck here.
George Freitag // 19 Mar, 2014
Old School Keyword Research with Google Webmaster Tools
“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
George Freitag // 26 Sep, 2013
Team Portent Weighs In On the Loss of Organic Keywords
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
George Freitag // 14 Sep, 2013
Portent Pop Quiz: George Freitag on Why You Should Delay Posting Your Videos on YouTube
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
George Freitag // 29 Aug, 2013
The Blogger Dashboard: Google Analytics for Writers
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
George Freitag // 9 Jul, 2013
Everything Non-SEOs Need To Know About SEO (Webinar)
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
George Freitag // 1 May, 2013
5 SEO Strategies We Swear Aren’t Going Anywhere
It seems like every other day, some SEO technique that used to be accepted is now being devalued or, even worse, penalized. (Remember when meta keywords and nofollow tags were totally legit? Ah, the good old days…) And now Google is threatening to crack down on two staples of the SEO stable: anchor text and… Read More
George Freitag // 26 Mar, 2013
How to Generate Video Sitemaps using Google Docs
Let me just start out with the ending. The Google Doc below takes a list of pages containing embedded YouTube or Vimeo videos and uses magic to grab all the data you need for a video XML sitemap. Then it makes the sitemap for you. You can have it by going to the link below… Read More
George Freitag // 5 Mar, 2013
Why Web Professionals Hate SEOs
Before I even became an SEO I learned to hate SEOs. After all, SEOs would take the beautiful, functional site the designers and developers spent their nights creating and cram it full of footer links, anchor text, H tags, nofollows, and any other piece of code they could think of until the site couldn’t breathe.… Read More
George Freitag // 27 Sep, 2012
The Brick and Mortar of Local SEO
As we’ve discussed during the earlier parts of our Local Series, directories and social networks are vital to getting your business found online. Directories feed search engines the data that justifies your business’ inclusion in the local results. Social networks get the word out to your customers and let you connect with them online. But,… Read More