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Scott Cowley | ZAGG | @scottcowley

Scott Cowley is head of SEO at ZAGG in Salt Lake City, where he is also a board member of Social Media Club. He writes and speaks about SEO, social media, blogging, and promotion marketing.

My 17-Point Checklist For Teaching Good Writing and Blogging

Image Credit One important lesson from "The Checklist Manifesto" is the idea of creating checklists to guard against failures in complex situations. Investment manager Mohnish Pabrai studied his own investment failures as well as those of notable investors like Warren Buffett and ended up with a 70-point checklist, meant to keep himself from repeating the same mistakes as he evaluated investment opportunities. I'm morally opposed to a 70-point anything, but a "complex situation"...

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Pinterest: Link Building & SEO Strategies

I've seen more SEO interest in Pinterest in the last month than the rest of the image bookmarking site's life. One day, I saw multiple veteran SEOs ask for an invite and I'm pretty sure they're not going for cute animal pictures and interior decorating ideas. Most of the SEO talk about Pinterest concern a couple of key tactics: (1) getting people to pin pictures of your products (aided by adding the

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Dear Internet Marketers: Stop Building Your Careers On A Single Commoditized Skill

I just finished conducting interviews for an in-house marketing position. Some of the people I interviewed had extensive backgrounds as copywriters and were looking to make career changes. I love copywriters and their penchant for huge doses of instant creativity. Unfortunately, the job security of the average copywriter can be shaky because copywriters do not have a monopoly on writing skills within a company. Good writers are found throughout an organization, not just in the copywriter...

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Effective Link Building Using Event Blogging

Photo Credit You can attend a conference or local event, blog about it, and people will link to it. Having blogged recaps to many different events with mixed backlink results, I’d like to address more effective ways of blogging about events, if SEO and link building is one of your primary goals. Pre-Event A few questions I ask when preparing for an event, from an SEO perspective: Who is writing online about the event? If someone is...

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Tools to Create Perfect Blog Post Graphics (Without All the Work)

Over a year ago, I wrote a post on blog post graphic resources, with most of my focus set on image generators. Since then, several new tools have been introduced that make it even easier for bloggers to create custom images to enhance their posts. Why Make Your Own Graphics? Blog posts are a package deal; exceptional writing can be hampered by boring or cliché pictures or videos, formatting, design, and accessibility. This inverse is also...

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Should Bloggers Be Nervous about Google Plus?

Google Plus is acquiring users at such a rapid pace that it’s impossible not to take notice. Many will point to charts, like the one below, to demonstrate the speed of unprecedented growth. I am particularly interested at the speed in which some notable people are shifting their resources and attention to - for a platform that’s less than a month old. Blogger Chris Brogan has effectively left Facebook for...

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SEO For The Oft-Neglected Blog Home Page

The blog home page is one of the least-optimized pages on a website. It doesn’t get nearly the same level of love as an individual post page when it comes to keyword research, SEO, and internal linking. I don’t think it’s intentional. I think it’s just easy to forget how authoritative blog home pages can be and how much traffic they can garner on their own. So what should you be...

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What Makes An Award-Winning Corporate Blog?

Most web-savvy companies know well enough that having a corporate blog is good business. It adds unique content to the site, it builds credibility of the company and employees, and provides more lead-generating, sales-driving opportunities. So how do you CRUSH it with your corporate blog? While doing some redesign planning on our own company blog, I ran into a great list of corporate blogs recently nominated for “Top Corporate Blog.”...

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So You Want To Start A Big SEO Blog?

Many SEOs have dreams of hitting it big in the SEO blogosphere. So where do you start? Is it better to be unique or better to be consistent with trends? Is it better to start the conversation or write about what people are already talking about? Without thinking too much into it, my split-second brain says that both are important. One is about being found and the other is about...

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Stuff Serious Bloggers Should Remember To Do In Google Analytics

If you’re interested in learning more about blogging optimization through SEO, you can join a free webinar I’ll be hosting today (March 23, 2011) at 11 am EST. Click here for more information. You don’t have to be an analytics geek or name your firstborn child Avinash to care about how people interact with your site. Many bloggers I’ve talked to recently get just as excited by traffic...

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