30th April 2010 (0 Comments)

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Services in Portland.      

Portland is a city located in the Northwestern United States, near the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers in the state of Oregon. As of July 2009, it has an estimated population of 582,130 making it the 29th most populous in the United States. It has been referred to as the most environmentally friendly or “green” city in the United States and the second most in the world. Portland SEO Services continue to thrive in this city.  Portland is Oregon’s most populous city, and the third most populous city in the Pacific Northwest, after Seattle, Washington, and Vancouver, British Columbia. Approximately two million people live in the Portland metropolitan area (MSA), the 23rd most populous in the United States as of July 2006.

Portland was incorporated in 1851 and is the county seat of Multnomah County. The city extends slightly into Washington County to the west and Clackamas County to the south. It is governed by a commission-based government headed by a mayor and four other commissioners.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site or a web page (such as a blog) from search engines via “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results as opposed to other forms of search engine marketing (SEM) which may deal with paid inclusion. The theory is that the earlier (or higher) a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search and industry-specific vertical search engines. This gives a web site web presence.

The city and region are noted for strong land-use planning and investment in light rail, supported by Metro, a distinctive regional-government. Portland is known for its large number of microbreweries and microdistilleries, as well as its coffee fanaticism. It is also the home of the Trail Blazers NBA team.

Portland lies in the Marine west coast climate region, marked by warm, dry summers and rainy but temperate winters. This climate is ideal for growing roses, and for more than a century, Portland has been known as “The City of Roses” with many rose gardens—most prominently the International Rose Test Garden.  SEO Services in Portland Oregon have grown in the past ten years.

As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.

The acronym “SEO” can refer to “search engine optimizers,” a term adopted by an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients, and by employees who perform SEO services in-house. Search engine optimizers may offer SEO as a stand-alone service or as a part of a broader marketing campaign. Because effective SEO may require changes to the HTML source code of a site, SEO tactics may be incorporated into web site development and design. The term “search engine friendly” may be used to describe web site designs, menus, content management systems, images, videos, shopping carts, and other elements that have been optimized for the purpose of search engine exposure.

Another class of techniques, known as black hat SEO or spamdexing, uses methods such as link farms, keyword stuffing and article spinning that degrade both the relevance of search results and the user-experience of search engines. Search engines look for sites that employ these techniques in order to remove them from their indices.

History of Portland, Oregon

Portland started as a spot known as “the clearing,” which was on the banks of the Willamette about halfway between Oregon City and Fort Vancouver. In 1843, William Overton saw great commercial potential for this land but lacked the funds required to file a land claim. He struck a bargain with his partner Asa Lovejoy of Boston, Massachusetts: for 25¢, Overton would share his claim to the 640 acre (2.6 km²) site. Overton later sold his half of the claim to Francis W. Pettygrove of Portland, Maine. Pettygrove and Lovejoy each wished to name the new city after his respective home town; this was decided with a coin toss, which Pettygrove won in a series of two out of three tosses. The coin used for this decision, now known as the Portland Penny, is on display in the headquarters of the Oregon Historical Society. SEO Services expand in Portland, Oregon.

Webmasters and content providers began optimizing sites for search engines in the mid-1990s, as the first search engines were cataloging the early Web. Initially, all a webmaster needed to do was submit the address of a page, or URL, to the various engines which would send a “spider” to “crawl” that page, extract links to other pages from it, and return information found on the page to be indexed. The process involves a search engine spider downloading a page and storing it on the search engine’s own server, where a second program, known as an indexer, extracts various information about the page, such as the words it contains and where these are located, as well as any weight for specific words, and all links the page contains, which are then placed into a scheduler for crawling at a later date.

Site owners started to recognize the value of having their sites highly ranked and visible in search engine results, creating an opportunity for both white hat and black hat SEO practitioners. According to industry analyst Danny Sullivan, the phrase “search engine optimization” probably came into use in 1997.

At the time of its incorporation on February 8, 1851 Portland had over 800 inhabitants, a steam sawmill, a log cabin hotel, and a newspaper, the Weekly Oregonian. By 1879, the population had grown to 17,500. The city merged with Albina and East Portland in 1891 and with Linnton and St. Johns in 1915. Portland SEO services continues to grow.

Portland’s location, with access both to the Pacific Ocean via the Willamette and the Columbia rivers and to the agricultural Tualatin Valley via the “Great Plank Road” through a canyon in the West Hills (the route of current-day U.S. Route 26), gave it an advantage over nearby ports, and it grew quickly. It remained the major port in the Pacific Northwest for much of the 19th century, until the 1890s, when Seattle’s deepwater harbor was connected to the rest of the mainland by rail, affording an inland route without the treacherous navigation of the Columbia River.

Early versions of search algorithms relied on webmaster-provided information such as the keyword meta tag, or index files in engines like ALIWEB. Meta tags provide a guide to each page’s content. Using meta data to index pages was found to be less than reliable, however, because the webmaster’s choice of keywords in the meta tag could potentially be an inaccurate representation of the site’s actual content. Inaccurate, incomplete, and inconsistent data in meta tags could and did cause pages to rank for irrelevant searches. Web content providers also manipulated a number of attributes within the HTML source of a page in an attempt to rank well in search engines.

By relying so much on factors such as keyword density which were exclusively within a webmaster’s control, early search engines suffered from abuse and ranking manipulation. To provide better results to their users, search engines had to adapt to ensure their results pages showed the most relevant search results, rather than unrelated pages stuffed with numerous keywords by unscrupulous webmasters. Since the success and popularity of a search engine is determined by its ability to produce the most relevant results to any given search, allowing those results to be false would turn users to find other search sources. Search engines responded by developing more complex ranking algorithms, taking into account additional factors that were more difficult for webmasters to manipulate.

 Nicknames

Main article: Nicknames of Portland, Oregon

The most common nickname for Portland is The City of Roses, and this became the city’s official nickname in 2003. Other nicknames include Stumptown, Bridgetown, Rip City,  Little Beirut, Beervana or Beertown, P-Town, and PDX.

Graduate students at Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, developed “backrub,” a search engine that relied on a mathematical algorithm to rate the prominence of web pages. The number calculated by the algorithm, PageRank, is a function of the quantity and strength of inbound links. PageRank estimates the likelihood that a given page will be reached by a web user who randomly surfs the web, and follows links from one page to another. In effect, this means that some links are stronger than others, as a higher PageRank page is more likely to be reached by the random surfer. Making SEO Portland Services at the top of the list.

Page and Brin founded Google in 1998. Google attracted a loyal following among the growing number of Internet users, who liked its simple design. Off-page factors (such as PageRank and hyperlink analysis) were considered as well as on-page factors (such as keyword frequency, meta tags, headings, links and site structure) to enable Google to avoid the kind of manipulation seen in search engines that only considered on-page factors for their rankings. Although PageRank was more difficult to game, webmasters had already developed link building tools and schemes to influence the Inktomi search engine, and these methods proved similarly applicable to gaming PageRank. Many sites focused on exchanging, buying, and selling links, often on a massive scale. Some of these schemes, or link farms, involved the creation of thousands of sites for the sole purpose of link spamming.

Topography

Portland lies at the northern end of Oregon’s most populated region, the Willamette Valley. However, as the metropolitan area is culturally and politically distinct from the rest of the valley, local usage often excludes Portland from the valley proper. Although almost all of Portland lies within Multnomah County, small portions of the city lie within Clackamas and Washington counties with mid-2005 populations estimated at 785 and 1,455, respectively. The Willamette River runs north through the city center, separating the east and west sections of the city before veering northwest to join with the Columbia River (which separates the state of Washington from the state of Oregon) a short distance north of the city.

According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 145.4 sq mi (376.5 km²). 134.3 sq mi (347.9 km²) of it is land and 11.1 sq mi (28.6 km²), or 7.6%, is water.

Portland lies on top of an extinct Plio-Pleistocene volcanic field known as the Boring Lava Field. The Boring Lava Field includes at least 32 cinder cones such as Mount Tabor, and its center lies in Southeast Portland. The dormant but potentially active volcano Mount Hood to the east of Portland is easily visible from much of the city during clear weather. The active volcano Mount Saint Helens to the north in Washington is visible in the distance from high-elevation locations in the city and is close enough to have dusted the city with volcanic ash after an eruption on May 18, 1980.

By 2004, search engines had incorporated a wide range of undisclosed factors in their ranking algorithms to reduce the impact of link manipulation. Google says it ranks sites using more than 200 different signals. The leading search engines, Google and Yahoo, do not disclose the algorithms they use to rank pages. Notable SEOs, such as Rand Fishkin, Barry Schwartz, Aaron Wall and Jill Whalen, have studied different approaches to search engine optimization, and have published their opinions in online forums and blogs. SEO practitioners may also study patents held by various search engines to gain insight into the algorithms.

In 2005 Google began personalizing search results for each user. Depending on their history of previous searches, Google crafted results for logged in users. In 2008, Bruce Clay said that “ranking is dead” because of personalized search. It would become meaningless to discuss how a website ranked, because its rank would potentially be different for each user and each search.

In 2007 Google announced a campaign against paid links that transfer PageRank. On June 15, 2009, Google disclosed that they had taken measures to mitigate the effects of PageRank sculpting by use of the nofollow attribute on links. Matt Cutts, a well-known software engineer at Google, announced that Google Bot would no longer treat nofollowed links in the same way, in order to prevent SEOs from using nofollow for PageRank sculpting. As a result of this change the usage of nofollow leads to evaporation of pagerank. In order to avoid the above, SEOs developed alternative techniques that replace nofollowed tags with obfuscated Javascript and thus permit PageRank sculpting. Additionally several solutions have been suggested that include the usage of iframes, Flash and Javascript. Knowing this Portland SEO Services can be very productive with it’s techniques.

Climate

Portland experiences a temperate climate that is usually described as Oceanic or Marine west coast, with mild, damp winters and relatively dry, warm summers. Like much of the Pacific Northwest, according to the Koeppen climate classification it falls within the cool, dry-summer subtropical zone (Csb), also referred to as cool-summer Mediterranean, due to its relatively dry summers. Other climate classification systems, such as Trewartha, place it firmly in the Oceanic zone (Do).

Summers in Portland are warm, sunny and rather dry, with July reaching an average high of 81 °F (27 °C) and a low of 58 °F (14 °C) late in the month. Due to its inland location and when there is an absence of a sea breeze, heatwaves occur (in particular during the months of July and August) with air temperatures rising to over 100 °F (38 °C). Winters can be mild to cold, and very moist, with January averaging a high of 46 °F (8 °C) and a low of 37 °F (3 °C), cold snaps are short-lived. Spring can bring rather unpredictable weather, resulting from warm spells, to thunderstorms rolling off the Cascade Range. The rainfall averages 37.5 inches (950 mm) per year in downtown Portland. Portland averages 155 days with measurable precipitation a year. Snowfall occurs no more than a few times per year, although the city has been known to see major snow and ice storms thanks to cold air outflow from the Columbia River Gorge. The city’s winter snowfall totals have ranged from just a trace on many occasions, to 60.9 inches (154.7 cm) in 1892-93. The lowest temperature ever recorded in Portland was −3 °F (−19 °C), set on February 2, 1950. The highest temperature ever recorded was 107 °F (42 °C), set on July 30, 1965 as well as August 8, 1981, and August 10, 1981. Temperatures of 100 °F (38 °C) have been recorded in each of the months from May through September.

In December 2009 Google announced it would be using the web search history of all its users in order to populate search results.

Real-time-search was introduced in late 2009 in an attempt to make search results more timely and relevant. Historically site administrators have spent months or even years optimizing a website to increase search rankings. With the growth in popularity of social media sites and blogs the leading engines made changes to their algorithms to allow fresh content to rank quickly within the search results. This new approach to search places importance on current, fresh and unique content. New Portland SEO companies open everyday.

Cityscape

Portland straddles the Willamette River near its confluence with the Columbia River. The denser and earlier-developed west side is mostly hemmed in by the nearby West Hills (Tualatin Mountains), though it extends over them to the border with Washington County. The flatter east side fans out for about 180 blocks, until it meets the suburb of Gresham. Rural Multnomah County lies farther east.

The sections of PortlandIn 1891 the cities of Portland, Albina, and East Portland were consolidated, and duplicate street names were given new names. The “great renumbering” on September 2, 1931 standardized street naming patterns, and changed house numbers from 20 per block to 100 per block. It divided Portland into five sections: Southwest, Southeast, Northwest, North, and Northeast. Burnside St. divides north and south, and the Willamette River divides east and west. The river curves west five blocks north of Burnside and in place of it, Williams Ave. is used as a divider. The North section lies between Williams Ave. and the Willamette River to the west.

On the west side, the RiverPlace, John’s Landing and South Waterfront Districts lie in a “sixth quadrant” where addresses go higher from west to east toward the river. This “sixth quadrant” is roughly bounded by Naito Parkway and Barbur Boulevard to the west, Montgomery Street to the north and Nevada Street to the south. East-West addresses in this area are denoted with a leading zero. (This means that 0246 SW California St. is NOT the same as 246 SW California St. Most mapping programs cannot distinguish these two different addresses.)

 Relationship with search engines

By 1997 search engines recognized that webmasters were making efforts to rank well in their search engines, and that some webmasters were even manipulating their rankings in search results by stuffing pages with excessive or irrelevant keywords. Early search engines, such as Infoseek, adjusted their algorithms in an effort to prevent webmasters from manipulating rankings. Portland SEO can help get your website on the grid.

Due to the high marketing value of targeted search results, there is potential for an adversarial relationship between search engines and SEOs. In 2005, an annual conference, AIRWeb, Adversarial Information Retrieval on the Web, was created to discuss and minimize the damaging effects of aggressive web content providers.

SEO companies that employ overly aggressive techniques can get their client websites banned from the search results. In 2005, the Wall Street Journal reported on a company, Traffic Power, which allegedly used high-risk techniques and failed to disclose those risks to its clients. Wired magazine reported that the same company sued blogger and SEO Aaron Wall for writing about the ban. Google’s Matt Cutts later confirmed that Google did in fact ban Traffic Power and some of its clients.

Some search engines have also reached out to the SEO industry, and are frequent sponsors and guests at SEO conferences, chats, and seminars. In fact, with the advent of paid inclusion, some search engines now have a vested interest in the health of the optimization community. Major search engines provide information and guidelines to help with site optimization. Google has a Sitemaps program to help webmasters learn if Google is having any problems indexing their website and also provides data on Google traffic to the website. Google guidelines are a list of suggested practices Google has provided as guidance to webmasters. Yahoo! Site Explorer provides a way for webmasters to submit URLs, determine how many pages are in the Yahoo! index and view link information. SEO Portland Services

Parks and gardens

Main article: List of parks in Portland, Oregon

A panoramic view of the International Rose Test Garden

Tom McCall Waterfront Park seen from the northPortland is proud of its parks and its legacy of preserving open spaces. Parks and greenspace planning date back to John Charles Olmsted’s 1903 Report to the Portland Park Board. In 1995, voters in the Portland metropolitan region passed a regional bond measure to acquire valuable natural areas for fish, wildlife, and people. Ten years later, more than 8,100 acres (33 km2) of ecologically valuable natural areas had been purchased and permanently protected from development.

Portland is one of only three cities in the contiguous U.S. with extinct volcanoes within its boundaries (besides Jackson, Mississippi and Bend, Oregon). Mount Tabor Park is known for its scenic views and historic reservoirs.

Forest Park is the largest wilderness park within city limits in the United States, covering more than 5,000 acres (20 km²). Portland is also home to Mill Ends Park, the world’s smallest park (a two-foot-diameter circle, the park’s area is only about 0.3 square m). Washington Park is just west of downtown, and is home to the Oregon Zoo, the Portland Japanese Garden, and the International Rose Test Garden. Nearby is Council Crest Park, the highest point in Portland.

Tom McCall Waterfront Park runs along the west bank of the Willamette for the length of downtown. The 37-acre (15 ha) park was built in 1974 after Harbor Drive was removed and now hosts large events throughout the year. Portland’s downtown features two groups of contiguous city blocks dedicated for park space: the North and South Park Blocks.

Tryon Creek State Natural Area is one of three Oregon State Parks in Portland and the most popular; its creek has a run of steelhead. The other two State Parks are Willamette Stone State Heritage Site located in the West Hills and the Government Island State Recreation Area located in the Columbia River near Portland International Airport.

Methods

Main article: search engine optimization methods

 Getting indexed

The leading search engines, such as Google and Yahoo!, use crawlers to find pages for their algorithmic search results. Pages that are linked from other search engine indexed pages do not need to be submitted because they are found automatically. Some search engines, notably Yahoo!, operate a paid submission service that guarantee crawling for either a set fee or cost per click. Such programs usually guarantee inclusion in the database, but do not guarantee specific ranking within the search results. Two major directories, the Yahoo Directory and the Open Directory Project both require manual submission and human editorial review. Google offers Google Webmaster Tools, for which an XML Sitemap feed can be created and submitted for free to ensure that all pages are found, especially pages that aren’t discoverable by automatically following links.

Search engine crawlers may look at a number of different factors when crawling a site. Not every page is indexed by the search engines. Distance of pages from the root directory of a site may also be a factor in whether or not pages get crawled.[

Culture and contemporary life

See also: List of fiction set in Oregon

Portland is well known as a hub of American DIY youth culture. From the late 1980s through today, Portland has been a major center for movements such as zine-making, including hosting such events as the Portland Zine Symposium and home to major zine distributors such as Microcosm. The DIY craft community has also seen a population explosion in Portland since the 1990s and now hosts such events as Crafty Wonderland and regular Church of Craft meetings, and is home to such stores as Knittn’ Kitten, SCRAP, and many independently-owned stores such as Bolt, PDX Seamsters Drop-in Sewing Studio, Yarn Garden, and the downtown Fiber District. Portland is also home to radical feminist and lesbian activist movements as well as the home city of The Worlds Oldest Teenage Drag Queen Pageant Rose Bud and Thorn Pageant started in 1975 and modeled after the Imperial Sovereign Rose Court of Oregon, and the city is also considered a haven for punk, hardcore, crust punk and anarchist movements and subgenres, including the self-reliant DIY culture movement that has been part of the aforementioned subcultures.

 Preventing crawling

Main article: Robots Exclusion Standard

To avoid undesirable content in the search indexes, webmasters can instruct spiders not to crawl certain files or directories through the standard robots.txt file in the root directory of the domain. Additionally, a page can be explicitly excluded from a search engine’s database by using a meta tag specific to robots. When a search engine visits a site, the robots.txt located in the root directory is the first file crawled. The robots.txt file is then parsed, and will instruct the robot as to which pages are not to be crawled. As a search engine crawler may keep a cached copy of this file, it may on occasion crawl pages a webmaster does not wish crawled. Pages typically prevented from being crawled include login specific pages such as shopping carts and user-specific content such as search results from internal searches. In March 2007, Google warned webmasters that they should prevent indexing of internal search results because those pages are considered search spam.

Entertainment and performing arts

See also: Music of Oregon#Portland

Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, home of the Oregon Symphony, among othersLike most large cities, Portland has a range of performing arts institutions which include the Oregon Ballet Theatre, Oregon Symphony, Portland Center Stage, Portland Baroque Orchestra and the Portland Opera. It also has quite a few stages similar to New York’s Off Broadway or Off-Off-Broadway such as Portland Center Stage, Artists Repertory Theatre, Miracle Theatre, Stark Raving Theatre, and Tears of Joy Theatre. Portland hosts the world’s only HP Lovecraft Film Festival at the Hollywood Theatre.

Portland is home to famous bands such as The Kingsmen and Paul Revere & the Raiders, both famous for Louie Louie. Other widely known musical groups include The Dandy Warhols, Everclear, Modest Mouse, Pink Martini, Sleater-Kinney, The Shins, Blitzen Trapper, The Decemberists, and the late Elliott Smith.

Widely recognized animators include Matt Groening (The Simpsons) and Will Vinton (Will Vinton’s A Claymation Christmas Celebration), and filmmaker Gus Van Sant (Good Will Hunting, “Milk”). Actors from Portland include Sam Elliott and Sally Struthers; authors include Ursula K. Le Guin, Beverly Cleary and Chuck Palahniuk. Dan Steffan, cartoonist-illustrator for Heavy Metal and other magazines, lives in Portland.

Recent films set and shot in Portland include Extraordinary Measures, Body of Evidence, What the Bleep Do We Know!?,The Hunted, Twilight, Paranoid Park, Wendy and Lucy, Feast of Love, and Untraceable. An unusual feature of Portland entertainment is the large number of movie theaters serving beer, often with second-run or revival films. A notable example of these “brew and view” theaters is The Bagdad Theater and Pub.

TV shows including Leverage and Under Suspicion have been filmed in Portland.

Increasing prominence

A variety of methods can increase the prominence of a webpage within the search results. Cross linking between pages of the same website to provide more links to most important pages may improve its visibility. Writing content that includes frequently searched keyword phrase, so as to be relevant to a wide variety of search queries will tend to increase traffic. Adding relevant keywords to a web page’s meta data, including the title tag and meta description will tend to improve the relevancy of a site’s search listings, thus increasing traffic. URL normalization of web pages accessible via multiple urls, using the “canonical” meta tag or via 301 redirects can help make sure links to different versions of the url all count towards the page’s link popularity score.

Tourism

See also: Tourism in Portland, Oregon and List of artists and art institutions in Portland, Oregon

The copper statue Portlandia above the entry to the Portland Building on SW 5th AvenuePortland is home to a diverse array of artists and arts organizations, and was named in 2006 by American Style magazine as the tenth best Big City Arts Destination in the U.S.

The Portland Art Museum owns the city’s largest art collection and presents a variety of touring exhibitions each year and with the recent addition of the Modern and Contemporary Art wing it became one of the United States’ twenty-five largest museums. Art galleries abound downtown and in the Pearl District, as well as in the Alberta Arts District and other neighborhoods throughout the city.

The Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI) is located on the east bank of the Willamette River across from downtown Portland, and contains a variety of hands-on exhibits covering the physical sciences, life science, earth science, technology, astronomy, and early childhood education. OMSI also has an OMNIMAX Theater and is home to the USS Blueback (SS-581) submarine, used in the film The Hunt for Red October.

Portland is also home to Portland Classical Chinese Garden, an authentic representation of a Suzhou-style walled garden.

Portlandia, a statue on the west side of the Portland Building, is the second-largest hammered-copper statue in the U.S. (after the Statue of Liberty). Portland’s public art is managed by the Regional Arts & Culture Council.

Powell’s City of Books claims to be the largest independent bookstore in the United States and the largest bookstore west of the Mississippi River.

The Portland Rose Festival takes place annually in June and includes two parades, dragon boat races, carnival rides at Tom McCall Waterfront park, and dozens of other events.

Washington Park, in the West Hills, is home to some of Portland’s most popular recreational sites, including the Oregon Zoo, the Portland Japanese Garden, the World Forestry Center, and the Hoyt Arboretum.

Portland hosts a number of festivals throughout the year in celebration of beer, including the Oregon Brewers Festival. Held each summer during the last full weekend of July, it is the largest outdoor craft beer festival in North America with over 70,000 attendees in 2008. Other major beer festivals throughout the calendar year include the Spring Beer and Wine Festival in April, the North American Organic Brewers Festival in June, the Portland International Beerfest in July, and the Holiday Ale Festival in December.

White hat versus black hat

SEO techniques are classified by some into two broad categories: techniques that search engines recommend as part of good design, and those techniques that search engines do not approve of and attempt to minimize the effect of, referred to as spamdexing. Some industry commentators classify these methods, and the practitioners who employ them, as either white hat SEO, or black hat SEO. White hats tend to produce results that last a long time, whereas black hats anticipate that their sites will eventually be banned once the search engines discover what they are doing.

A SEO tactic, technique or method is considered white hat if it conforms to the search engines’ guidelines and involves no deception. As the search engine guidelines are not written as a series of rules or commandments, this is an important distinction to note. White hat SEO is not just about following guidelines, but is about ensuring that the content a search engine indexes and subsequently ranks is the same content a user will see.

White hat advice is generally summed up as creating content for users, not for search engines, and then making that content easily accessible to the spiders, rather than attempting to game the algorithm. White hat SEO is in many ways similar to web development that promotes accessibility, although the two are not identical.

Black hat SEO attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines, or involve deception. One black hat technique uses text that is hidden, either as text colored similar to the background, in an invisible div, or positioned off screen. Another method gives a different page depending on whether the page is being requested by a human visitor or a search engine, a technique known as cloaking.

Search engines may penalize sites they discover using black hat methods, either by reducing their rankings or eliminating their listings from their databases altogether. Such penalties can be applied either automatically by the search engines’ algorithms, or by a manual site review. One infamous example was the February 2006 Google removal of both BMW Germany and Ricoh Germany for use of deceptive practices. Both companies, however, quickly apologized, fixed the offending pages, and were restored to Google’s list.

Shopping

The Made in Oregon signPortland has many options for shopping. Some of the well known shopping areas are Downtown Portland, N.W. 23rd Avenue, Pearl District, and the Lloyd District. Major department stores include Nordstrom, Macy*s, Saks 5th Avenue, and Mario’s. The major malls in the metropolitan area are Bridgeport Village, Washington Square, Clackamas Town Center, Lloyd Center, Vancouver Mall, and Pioneer Place. Another destination is The Saturday Market, a town bazaar-like environment where many kinds of goods are sold from Artisan Crafts to Tibetan Imports, reflecting the many cultures of Portland. The Saturday Market is open every weekend from March through Christmas. The Made in Oregon company is based in Portland; they specialize in Oregon produced products and gifts.

 As a marketing strategy

SEO is not necessarily an appropriate strategy for every website, and other Internet marketing strategies can be much more effective, depending on the site operator’s goals. A successful Internet marketing campaign may drive organic traffic to web pages, but it also may involve the use of paid advertising on search engines and other pages, building high quality web pages to engage and persuade, addressing technical issues that may keep search engines from crawling and indexing those sites, setting up analytics programs to enable site owners to measure their successes, and improving a site’s conversion rate.

SEO may generate a return on investment. However, search engines are not paid for organic search traffic, their algorithms change, and there are no guarantees of continued referrals. (Some trading sites such as eBay can be a special case for this, it will announce how and when the ranking algorithm will change a few months before changing the algorithm). Due to this lack of guarantees and certainty, a business that relies heavily on search engine traffic can suffer major losses if the search engines stop sending visitors. It is considered wise business practice for website operators to liberate themselves from dependence on search engine traffic. A top-ranked SEO blog Seomoz.org has suggested, “Search marketers, in a twist of irony, receive a very small share of their traffic from search engines..” Instead, their main sources of traffic are links from other websites.

Breweries

Portland is well-known for its microbrewery beer. Oregon Public Broadcasting has documented Portland’s role in the microbrew revolution in the United States, in a report called, “Beervana,” a term that refers to a distinctly “Portland state of mind”. Some illustrate Portlanders’ interest in the beverage by an offer made in 1888, when local brewer Henry Weinhard volunteered to pump beer from his brewery into the newly dedicated Skidmore Fountain. However, the renown for quality beer dates to the 1980s, when state law was changed to allow consumption of beer on brewery premises. In short order, microbreweries and brewpubs began to pop up all over the city. Their growth was supported by the abundance of local ingredients, including two-row barley, over a dozen varieties of hops, and pure water from the Bull Run Watershed. The Willamette Valley is one of the leading hop growing regions in the United States.

Today, with twenty-eight breweries within the city, Portland is home to more breweries than any other city in the country. The McMenamin brothers alone have over thirty brewpubs, distilleries, and wineries scattered throughout the metropolitan area, several in renovated theaters and other old buildings otherwise destined for demolition. Other notable Portland brewers include Widmer Brothers, BridgePort, and Hair of the Dog, as well as numerous smaller quality brewers. In 1999, author Michael “Beerhunter” Jackson called Portland a candidate for the beer capital of the world because the city boasted more breweries than Cologne, Germany. The Portland Oregon Visitors Association is promoting “Beervana” and “Brewtopia” as nicknames for the city. In mid-January 2006, Mayor Tom Potter officially gave the city a new nickname—Beertown.

 International markets

Optimization techniques are highly tuned to the dominant search engines in the target market. The search engines’ market shares vary from market to market, as does competition. In 2003, Danny Sullivan stated that Google represented about 75% of all searches. In markets outside the United States, Google’s share is often larger, and Google remains the dominant search engine worldwide as of 2007. As of 2006, Google had an 85-90% market share in Germany. While there were hundreds of SEO firms in the US at that time, there were only about five in Germany. As of June 2008, the marketshare of Google in the UK was close to 90% according to Hitwise. That market share is achieved in a number of countries.

As of 2009, there are only a few large markets where Google is not the leading search engine. In most cases, when Google is not leading in a given market, it is lagging behind a local player. The most notable markets where this is the case are China, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the Czech Republic where respectively Baidu, Yahoo! Japan, Naver, Yandex and Seznam are market leaders.

Successful search optimization for international markets may require professional translation of web pages, registration of a domain name with a top level domain in the target market, and web hosting that provides a local IP address. Otherwise, the fundamental elements of search optimization are essentially the same, regardless of language.

Cuisine

 Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Restaurants in Portland, Oregon

Portland has a growing restaurant scene, and among three nominees, was recognized by the Food Network Awards as their “Delicious Destination of the Year: A rising city with a fast-growing food scene” for 2007.

The original Stumptown Coffee location at 47th and Division.The New York Times also spotlighted Portland for its burgeoning restaurant scene in the same year. Travel + Leisure ranked Portland #9 among all national cities in 2007. The city is also known for being the most vegetarian-friendly city in America.

In addition to beer, Portland has become known as a premier coffee destination in the Pacific Northwest, second only to Seattle in terms of the abundance of its coffee houses. Yelp.com lists more than 20 coffee houses in Portland with 4.5-5 star ratings. The city is home to the original Stumptown Coffee Roasters, well-known by aficionados as one of the nation’s highest quality direct-trade roasteries, as well as dozens of other micro-roasteries and cafes.

Legal precedents

On October 17, 2002, SearchKing filed suit in the United States District Court, Western District of Oklahoma, against the search engine Google. SearchKing’s claim was that Google’s tactics to prevent spamdexing constituted a tortious interference with contractual relations. On May 27, 2003, the court granted Google’s motion to dismiss the complaint because SearchKing “failed to state a claim upon which relief may be granted.”

In March 2006, KinderStart filed a lawsuit against Google over search engine rankings. Kinderstart’s web site was removed from Google’s index prior to the lawsuit and the amount of traffic to the site dropped by 70%. On March 16, 2007 the United States District Court for the Northern District of California (San Jose Division) dismissed KinderStart’s complaint without leave to amend, and partially granted Google’s motion for Rule 11 sanctions against KinderStart’s attorney, requiring him to pay part of Google’s legal expenses.

Sports

Main article: Sports in Portland, Oregon

 The Rose Garden, home of the Portland Trail Blazers.Portland is home to the Trail Blazers of the National Basketball Association. Beginning in 2011, the city will host a Major League Soccer franchise, which will be a continuation of the Portland Timbers. The city is also home to a number of minor league teams. Running is a popular sport in the metropolitan area, which hosts the Portland Marathon and much of the Hood to Coast Relay (the world’s largest such event). Skiing and snowboarding are also highly popular, with a number of nearby resorts on Mount Hood, including year-round Timberline.

It was formerly home to the Portland Rosebuds of the Pacific Coast Hockey Association, the first professional sports team in Oregon and the first professional hockey team in the U.S. The Rosebuds played in the 1916 Stanley Cup Final, the first U.S. team to do so.

Portland has one of the most active bicycle racing scenes in the United States, with hundreds of events sanctioned each year by the Oregon Bicycle Racing Association. Weekly events at Alpenrose Velodrome and Portland International Raceway allow for racing nearly every night of the week during spring and summer, and fall cyclocross races such as the Cross Crusade can have over 1000 riders and boisterous spectators.

Additionally, the Portland metro has its own Cricket league, Oregon Cricket League (OCL) that hosts 2 formats of the outdoor game of cricket every year.