Since 2011 is nearly outta here, I’d thought I’d compile a list of all the ways it was awesome. To be personal though, 2011 wasn’t one of my best years. Some pretty amazing things happened though that could make 2012 one of the best.

• I finally got a big girl job! I’d been working in a pharmacy since high school. Two years after graduating college, I finally landed an amazing job doing SEO at One Click Ventures. I had no clue what I’d be doing when I arrived on my first day, but jumped in anyway, and loved it.
• New home, new car. 2011 brought me my first apartment on my own. I’ve lived with several roommates in the past, but this is the first time I’ve been on my own, and I love it. I also bought a new car that actually works well. Which brings me to my next bullet point…
• Learned to drive a manual transmission. So mayyyybe I bought a manual car before I even knew how to drive it. But I really liked the car, and I’ve always wanted to learn. Best way to learn something is to d(r)ive in, right?

heyyyy girl

•  2011- The year of travels! Back in high school and my early college days, I traveled quite a bit. It took a halt when I moved to Alabama, but now that I’m back home, I set off. Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, Washington (state and DC)… I got around. I visited Seattle for work, saw some old and new friends on the East coast, and went to pick up my heart in the land of Dixie.

• I need to not neglect this blog as much as I do. I started an SEO blog because that’s what takes up most of my time, but I may do more personal things for it. Or it may stay just SEO, who knows?
• Rekindle my Japanese. I spent some time in Japan in 2001, and studied the language for four years. The first time I sang karaoke was in Japanese. I still think in Japanese occasionally, but can’t speak it anymore. Let’s change that.

OMGcute!

•  More travels! I’m planning a trip to New York City, as I’ve neglected it for about ten years. Explore the Midwest too, since I love it and all…
• Grow my career, in whatever way that may mean. Whether it’s speaking at events or just simply learning, settling for “just good enough” isn’t cool.

Hooray! Google+ for Business is now open. This is good for a few reasons– the most obvious is the social sharing, and now we’ve got examples of g+ links being indexed (what!)? Let’s do it!

One of the websites I’m a part of, Scarves.net, is expecting a big change in January, and we want to go ahead and start building it up a little bit. The site is already active and gets good traffic, but we’ll be adding an e-commerce platform to it. In anticipation, I’m going to get our Google+ page up and running before the e-commerce launch.

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Like every female who has internet access, I’ve recently become addicted to Pinterest. Pinterest is a social-based sharing website where you create your own “pin boards,” and pin anything to them, from recipes to hairstyles, DIY projects to cute monkeys. Users can upload their own images, or pin things from their favorite blogs, retailers, or other resources.

There have been a few posts lately about how Pinterest is beneficial to SEO, because things on Pinterest spread like wildfire. It’s a great place to stick your content, especially if it’s image-heavy. I’ve recently started using these pins for guest post prospecting. Since it’s terribly easy to find something specific on Pinterest, it’s just as easy to find your targets.

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After attending MozCon this summer, one thing became pretty clear to me; there aren’t many females in the world of SEO. Why is that? As one of these rare “SEO females,” there are a couple of reasons I’ve stuck around.

Creativity

One thing that drives me crazy are the people that think SEO’s sit around all day, keyword stuff, and spam blog comments. The bad ones might, but the good ones are smarter than that. It’s just not creative. Half the fun of being an SEO is brainstorming new and exciting ways to acquire links.

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Since my job is awesome and provides me with the freedoms to explore options within my career, I quickly jumped at the chance to simply learn more. I’ve always been super curious and excited to learn, so when I was told that learning and personal development were encouraged, I was happy.

I poked around in parts of SEO that I wasn’t terribly familiar with, until I discovered the technical side. Fixing site errors and on-site optimization just clicked with me, and I was fully supported to test out all the cool new things I’d been learning. When I got the ranking results back that showed how well this stuff works, I was hooked.

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So that contest I entered a few weeks ago on behalf of One Click Ventures…?

I won second place. :)

When you love what you do, it’s kind of nice to be rewarded for it sometimes. I can’t wait to geek out over the NYC SearchLove videos and keep on learning!

Thanks, Distilled!

The company that I work for, One Click Ventures, entered to win tickets to the Distilled SearchLove NYC Conference. Wish us luck! Below is my official entry on why my organic search team is awesome.

One Click Ventures is a small company that owns several e-commerce stores, and we are strictly in-house. We are located in Greenwood, Indiana, just a few miles south of Indianapolis.

I LOVE IT.

That’s all….  perhaps a preview to some ideas for a blog post brewing in my head? And I felt I should add soooomething.

Anyone who link builds needs to keep track of their backlinks. There are several internet marketing tools available to SEOs, but at One Click Ventures we use Raven. I can’t speak on behalf of the rest of the office, but I love it.

The first thing you need to do is set up an account and add your websites/campaigns and users. At One Click, we do e-commerce, and Raven lets us easily set up an account for each store, as well as each link builder. I’ve tested out some other platforms, and from what I’ve seen, Raven the most organized.

Once you’re up and running, you’ll be taken to your dashboard. From here, you have access to everything. You’ll notice at the top that you can easily switch between profiles and websites.

empty Raven Dashboard

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