I don't like trying to package everything that's happening in our industry into a neat little box, because it's like trying to describe the cause of the Civil War in two sentences. I'm likely to leave some things out, overstate some factors, and unintentionally offend some people. But I do think that an individual perspective .

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 .

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 .

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,

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?

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 true.

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.

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 doing differently?

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 .

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 being relevant. But what does the data say?

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.

In blogging, the written word will never die, but 2011 marks a time in blogging where creating video content has never been cheaper, or easier. So what are you waiting for? Here are 23 reasons you should add video blogging )vlogging( to your mix. 1. Passion Are you using CAPS LOCK to demonstrate your passion? Try video instead. 2. Empathy Bloggers who write about controversial topics are more likely to be demonized in pure print.

If you're considering running a contest on your blog, it can be a great way to get new readers, build links, earn community goodwill, and position yourself top-of-mind in your niche. There are countless ways to screw up your own contest though. Here are some of the worst offenders. Giving away something people don't want. Guess how many people are going to enter your contest if you give away "5 shout-outs on Twitter?

On-page internal linking to benefit SEO will occasionally deal heavy damage to the conversion funnel. If sites wish to thrive in the future, on-page linking strategies needs to be planned holistically and framed with an understanding that SEO is just one aspect that needs to be considered. If you took inventory of all your site links, internal or externally bound, you'd find that they would all fall along a spectrum of helpfulness: helpfulness to the business vs.