I’m so excited to welcome the wonderful Annabel Hodges aka Search Panda to the SEO-Chicks blogging crew. We’ve been eyeing her up for ages thinking she is probably crazy enough to become one of the SEO Chicks, and turns out she is. Yay!

We asked Annabel a few questions before “hiring” her into the crew of course, some very qualifying, difficult and important questions:

1. How did you get into SEO?
I was a translator back in the day and getting very very bored of it. I started trying to learn a little more about search and analytics in my spare time as my housemate got me interested in it and I got hooked. I then got a job with a small design/development agency who had just won some multinational clients and had a choice: train linguists up in search or train search marketers to speak other languages. Simple decision!

2. What makes your SEO heart tick?
Two things mainly:
1. Data. And by that I mean those times when you really manage to get some juicy findings that suddenly change the way you look at what you’ve been doing.
2. Direct input/output of work. Over the years I’ve realised it’s pretty rare to be in a job where you have that satisfaction. On your own sites, if not your clients. You always get to tweak and learn and change and see, monitoring the direct impact of what you do and inputting back into that cycle. So many people work in a job where their day-to-day efforts get lost in a bigger machine.

3. Do you like Adam Ant or even know who he is? (only Julie cares about this)
Anyone who gave us Stand and Deliver deserves to be liked. That and his cameo in Northern Exposure.

4. Rock or Pop?
Hmm tough one. I’d have to go rock. Give me a good dose of guitar fuzz anyday. (Having said that, I’m never one to turn down a well produced pop song. Where would the world be without it?!)

5. What does feminism mean to you?
Oddly, quite a lot although I hate it when people bang on about it all the time. I’ve never been a particularly girly girl but I have dealt with a fair amount of stereotyping and pre-conceptions over the years, which have made me a feminist at heart. One thing I would say is ‘never judge a book by its cover’. I may like fashion and own too many shoes, it doesn’t mean I can’t hold my own. I also have a solid knowledge of Marvel comic book characters and Bruce Lee movies – what does that signify? You can wear makeup and a skirt while still being a technical/analytical person – despite some common beliefs, the two are not mutually exclusive.

6. Robot dance or ballet?
Robot dance every time. That and I do a great foot shuffle. It’s my main party trick. I’m far too clumsy for the likes of ballet.

7. Why the Pandas?
I’m half Chinese but don’t really look it which has always been a source of slight bemusement to my family. When I was about 5 one of my aunts gave me a porcelain panda and we went to Beijing Zoo to see them. It made a lasting impression as a way of feeling more part of my Asian culture somehow! That and they’re totally ridiculous. I have a love of ridiculous, clumsy animals. I empathise.

8. What did you want to be when you were little?
Janet Jackson’s backing dancer. It would have been a dream come true. Then until I was 18 or so, a vet. But I realised the amount of time and money it would take to achieve were pretty ridiculous, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to have my hand up a cow’s arse for the rest of my working life.

9. Who’s your Obi Wan Kenobi?
Erm Obi Wan Kenobi himself would do. Other than that (and all the SEO Chicks of course ), I’d say people like some of the women who’ve made it at Google – Vanessa Fox, Marissa Mayer et al. Simply because it’s a tough place to be and they proved themselves. Oh and my Mum. I’m pretty sure she’d take Obi Wan down in a fight.

10. What do you think of becoming an SEO Chick?
I’m an SEO. I’m a Chick. And I’m pretty damn proud to be both of those things so hell, seems like a natural conclusion!

So there you have it, the proof is in the pudding (or the questions in this case). Annabel is an awesome panda rocking, robot dancing, cartoon loving, translating SEO – who will ‘stand and deliver’ the SEO awesomeness to a screen near you. Wilkommen, beinvenue, WELCOME!

Elisa Gabbert is the content manager at WordStream, where she runs the WordStream Internet Marketing Blog and helps market the company’s AdWords software, PPC management services and keyword research tools. She also writes poetry and perfume criticism. She currently lives in Denver. You can follow her on Twitter at @egabbert (but expect tasteless jokes and bad puns).

1. Can you give us a summary of your SEO experience thus far? What is your current niche?

I got into the SEO industry about five years ago, sort of by accident – I was working as an editorial assistant on a website at a big media company. Their model was to run a bunch of highly targeted websites (each aimed at a slice of the technology market, mostly B2B but some B2C as well – stuff like Oracle, Linux, server storage, etc.) and sell advertising against those sites. When I started, no one even knew what SEO was, but it slowly became a bigger and bigger part of our strategy company-wide. Most people hated it – the company employed a lot of journalists who were coming from a print background – but a few people saw how important it was and some (crazy nerds) even found it interesting (oh, hi). So I moved into an “SEO specialist” role, making recommendations for a group of websites.

Now I work as a copywriter for a venture-backed startup that offers search marketing software and services, including a PPC management platform and various SEO tools (free and paid). We like to say this is the Olympics of search, because we’re competing to rank on search marketing terms with other companies that, like us, really know search marketing. So it’s very challenging, and VERY META.

2. How do you feel about the recent Google privacy changes that will now prevent us from seeing logged-in Google keyword data in Google Analytics? It’s apparently not the case for PPC. Fair or not?

I actually just blogged about this news. I tend to side with the “privacy schmivacy” folks – clearly other motives were driving this decision. I think it sucks because that’s such useful data. The worry is that it will eventually affect all organic referrals, as opposed to just a fraction as it does now. Then keyword research/optimization for SEO officially becomes total guesswork.

3. Any tips on how to use PPC data for organic SEO and link building?

Especially now that Google is taking away some of your organic search query data, it’s super important to keep an eye on your search query report if you do PPC. Assuming you’re using broad match and modified broad match (and you should be, in concert with negative keywords), you’ll be able to discover all kinds of new keywords that you can then incorporate into your content strategy. If you manage pretty large, complicated accounts, you might want to take a look at Chad Summerhill’s tips for search query mining – he includes a link to an Excel download that can help you sort through the data. You can download the full series in PDF as part of our negative keyword e-book.

4. Besides Wordstream tools, what else do you use?

I usually use our own tool for keyword research, but I sometimes consult the Google keyword tool for comparison. I also use Google Analytics. Otherwise it’s mostly me and a Word doc. And Twitter! I’m on Twitter all day. As a writer, I can focus on content strategy and leave most of the hardcore geek stuff to our SEO guy. I avoid Excel whenever possible.

5. What are the best resources available for someone with a small budget, new to PPC?

How small is small? If we’re talking really tiny, Google offers “AdWords Express” which requires very little effort on the advertiser’s part, but you give up a lot of control, so that’s iffy unless you’re talking a budget of like $100 a month and no experience with PPC. Beyond that, I’d recommend reading a lot of blogs to keep up with PPC best practices and the constant changes and additions to the AdWords interface. Tom Demers is my point man for keeping up with AdWords. And here’s a big list of awesome PPC blogs from BoostCTR. (Speaking of which, BoostCTR is an affordable way to get help with your ad copy.) Attend webinars, download white papers – take advantage of all the free resources that PPC companies offer in order to get your email address. The amount you can afford to spend on getting help with PPC will depend on your monthly budget. If you’re spending $1,000 a month or more, you can probably afford to invest in some tools.

6. What’s a typical day like for you?

The first thing I do every morning – after checking my email and putting out any fires – is publish a new blog post on the WordStream blog. We try to do at least one new post every week day. The blog is my baby. Then I push it out through Twitter and poke around on TweetDeck to see what people are talking about. The rest of my day is some combination of meetings (talking strategy with the rest of the marketing team, planning for new features or product launches, etc.) and writing and/or editing (articles for our own blog, guest posts and contributed articles, email marketing, white papers, and so on and so on), with a little social media and link promotion sprinkled in for good measure.

7. Name your dream client and tell us why.

Anthropologie, because maybe we could work out some kind of discount? (Editor’s note: you and me both, sister.)

8. What’s the best piece of SEO advice you’ve ever received? Ever given?

I think the best advice I got was from Larry Kim, who told me to copy Wikipedia. Who else, aside from Google itself, enjoys first-page rankings for such a wide array of keywords? So we try to emulate them on a smaller scale – create encyclopedic content on a topic (for us, that’s search marketing); organize it taxonomically; interlink heavily; use the keyword in the URL, title, first sentence, subheads, image file names and alt text; build anchor text links; etc….

As for given? My favorite piece of advice is: When you don’t know what to blog about, consult your analytics. Inevitably, you’ll find a traffic-driving search query that you don’t have a dedicated post for yet. So write it, duh!
9. Write an SEO haiku. Just kidding!! Who’d win in a fight between Martin Amis and Ian McEwan?

I don’t know, they’re both pretty namby-pamby, wouldn’t you say? I think the ghost of Kingsley Amis, annoyed by their bickering, would hangover-vomit on them from above. (Editor’s note: I think Amis is less so than McEwan but McEwan is creepier, therefore he’d win. However that 9/11 book by Martin proved that he’s a bit scary, so…ok Amis would win.)

10. What’s the biggest bullshit SEO advice going around today? I’m quite annoyed by all of the “must do” items being pushed about. We didn’t have freaking wordpress tags in place and we still ranked, damn you all!!

The perpetual thorn in my side is the obsession with getting into Google News. Sure, it can send lots of traffic, but I think evergreen content is more useful for our business model.

11. If you were not working in SEO, what would you be doing, besides staying home watching Oprah reruns and eating moonpies? Or is that just me?

I’m a writer, so I’d spend my days writing about one of my other interests – mostly frivolous things like perfume and outfits, but I’m also into lofty pretentious stuff like poetry and women’s rights and “culture.” So if it weren’t for this SEO gig I’d probably be our generation’s Joan Didion.

12. Who are the most fun SEOs you’ve met and why? For the sake of not having to arsekiss this cannot include any of your bosses.

Can it include you or does that count as arsekissing? (Editor’s note: I’d have accepted that HAD YOU MENTIONED ME.) My former bosses, Tom Demers and Ken Lyons (who now run Measured SEM), are a laugh a minute. I’ve met a lot of great people through WordStream. If Twitter counts as a “meetingplace,” I’m a big fan of Dr. Pete.

13. What’s the ickiest search you’ve ever stumbled across? When I was researching the types of chickens I wanted to get (shut up) I accidentally searched for “black sex links” instead of “black sex link chickens.” Yeah. Unfun. Luckily it was a web search, not an image search.

I’m totally impressed that you have chickens. Please invite me over for breakfast. (I mean to eat eggs, not the chickens.) I don’t think I’ve ever “accidentally” searched for kinky sex tricks, but one of the common keyword referrals for my blog is “dave matthews band tattoos.” How icky is that? Also “emo gay sex blogspot,” but that’s just cute.

Now this is Julie talking…I realize there are a lot of links to Wordstream here so before any of you start thinking they’re giving me free stuff or in any way influencing me, let me say that I WISH THEY DID. They don’t. I just think Elisa is three hoots and I like to see literate folk in our industry. Thanks for the interview Ms. Gabbert!!

Hi there, it’s me…Julie, the one who used to be prolific here but is no longer due to maddening amounts of chaos in my life that now includes a killer bloodhound, a flock of 6 hens, and a fledgling attic squirrel population. However, considering it’s this site that brought a lot of the aforementioned chaos (ie blogging opportunities and proper business) I should take it a bit more seriously, especially as I’m vacationing with the Viking and her family in August and France is the perfect spot for her to beat my ass, because we’ll all be consuming loads of Camembert and local wine. Oh, and omelettes, because that’s listed as the main vegetarian option in Normandy. Yay.

Anyway, looking back over the years, we’ve had some amazing posts here, and I love finding older articles when I do a search for something industry-related mostly because I love seeing how the industry changes, how what we think about a certain metric or technique goes out of fashion or stands up. With that in mind, here’s a list of the 20 most popular SEO Chicks posts over the past 4 years, for your viewing pleasure.

Do You Want To Rank For Large Fish?
Oh My Christ They Got Facebook
The Local File Google Local Business Hijacking Issues
Top 10 Favourite WordPress Plugins By A Pregnant Chick
Twitter Is Not A Social Media Strategy
How To Get More Followers On Twitter If You’re A Girl And Aren’t All That Interesting
SEOs Should Moonlight
How Keyword Matching Is Just A Little Like Online Dating
Shock Horror Blackhat SEO Discussed At SMX Advanced
Why Relevant Links Are Irrelevant
SEO Sheep Are Baaaaaaad
Google I Don’t Get It! Com vs Co.UK
Even A Blind Hog Finds An Acorn Now And Then
The Best Job In The World
How To Interpret What Your Clients Want
Could A Chimp Do SEO? Heck Yes!
What’s Changed In The Matrix? Ehm I Mean Algos
Yoda’s Ultimate Tool List Part 1: Competitive Research
Our Princess Leia: An Interview With Dazzlin’ Donna
Let’s Talk About Spaceships

As the SEO-Chicks are blogging partners of SMX London we have bagged ourselves ONE FULL CONFERENCE pass to SMX London next week, but not only that, the ticket would also give you full access to the fabulous partner conference the day after: International Search Summit.

In addition the winner will also get to post a blogpost of his/hers experience as the conference on the SEO Chicks blog (along with a link to their blog and/or twitter profile).

How YOU can WIN?
We have given away tickets in the past where people winning the ticket only went to one day of the conference, so THIS time we want to give the ticket to someone that really really wants it and will attend the whole conference. We would like to help an “SEO Jedi in Training” to find their “force” and hang out with other SEOs. Therefore we specify that the chosen winner can’t be an already known name in the SEO industry and has to have been in SEO no longer than 2 years. The winner will be picked this Thursday (12th May)!

So how can you win? Simply retweet the following:

RT @SEOchicks Calling all SEO “Newbies” WIN a FULL conference pass to SMX London and ISS next week http://is.gd/pKlTHn #SEOJediInTraining

Obvioulsy you don’t need to to be a newbie to retweet, any help spreading the word is appreciated. Good luck!

The lovely Joanna Butler with her ridiculously crappy clothes pegs! In fact Joanna won hands down on the votes, pretty much 90% of you agreed that clothes pegs is a pretty crap Christmas present. So Joanna you are the winner of the #SEScrapmas competition and you will recieve a full conference pass to SES London 2011, whoop whoop!

Ultimate Crappy Xmas gift – “the clothes pegs”

On a different note, it was pretty funny how many comments and tweets we had objecting to the “Search Tower” lego set being a crap gift, aww all the lego fans (including my hubby).

Lastly, thank you to everyone that tweeted, facebooked and voted. Until next year…

SES London is just around the corner (22-24th February), and as official, associated sponsors; the SEO Chicks have a little Christmas love for you. And no greater love can an SEO have to give, than a free conference pass to one of the hottest search events of the year. Yeah,.. that’s right. I said “hottest” and “search event” together, (and that’s before we get to the party that Nichola Stott and Joanna Butler are organising – supported by SES. More to follow on party details later)

Now; we Chicks don’t just give our goodies away. Oh-no! You have to work for them.  So we thought it would be great to put on a little festive competition to give YOU the chance to win this fabulous SES Conference Pass!

Here’s the deal; have you ever received a crap Christmas gift? Of course you have! You remember the reindeer jumper from Aunt Edna? Daddy Day Care  on VHS, or the funny present from your brother that just wasn’t funny? (I once recieved a packet of crackerbread for christmas, it was wrapped and everything. I mean, really? WTF?). And have you every thought; “man I wish this was a ticket to SES instead”? Ok so maybe not that thought exactly, BUT the idea is you finally get to exchange your #crap for #win. Tweet us a pic of your crappest gift, in exchange for a ticket to SES London (2011) – and it’s a full conference pass (worth £1195 none the less).

Here’s an infographic, because it don’t mean shit till you see the infographic right?

Into this:

Here’s the deal:

1. Take a picture of your crappest christmas gift (preferably also with your lovely “mug” in the pic).
2. Tweet the photo along with the hashtag #SEScrapmas

We will then select the top 3 crappiest Christmas gifts and let our readers vote for the ultimate crappiest one and the lucky winner will then be able to exchange his/hers crappy gift for a shiny ticket to SES London!

The final 3 photos will be chosen and published on Wednesday 12th January and the winner crowned Friday 14th Jan 2011. Happy crappy christmas recieving..ehm that don’t even make sense….you get the drift.

ps: You can of course enter even though you don’t live in the UK but the price is for the conference ticket only, not hotel and flights, just so that’s covered.

The new SEO-Chicks have been revealed and they are already planning their first official blogposts. But as we revealed the identities of our winners we have also received allot of questions from readers about the identies of the other finalist in the blogging competition. So, with their permission, here’s the identities of the other 4 brilliant entries from the blogging competition:

Entry #2 – Diplomacy – the hidden quality of a successful

Author: Natalie Sandifer
Title: Website Optimiser for Equi=Media.
About: Natalie have been working within website optimisation for two years, she lives in Swindon, but is originally from Newbury in Berkshire. She lives with her husband and three pet lizards (It seems Sarah isn’t the only one keeping pets out of the ordinary, lizards, rats…brrrrr.)

Entry #3 – PPC decline, AdWords & SEO: Where is online marketing headed?

Author: Sandy Cosser
Title: Content Manager at MediaVision Interactive
About: Sandy got into SEO as she wanted to write for a living, she lives in South Africa with her two dwarf rabbits, Defibrillator and Skittles (yep there is a pet theme in this post). Sandy is a self proclaimed “book worm” and when she is not glued to her laptop she reads anything she can get her hands on (she mentiones Stephen King as a literal god and Terry Pratchett, Charles Dickens and China Mieville as saints).

Entry #4 – 15 Must-Follow Tips for Live Tweeting Conferences

Author: Joanna Butler
Title: SEO Strategist at Lattitude Group
About: Joanna has worked as a designer and developer for 8 years before falling into SEO. She tought herself HTML at the age of 14 and is a self proclaimed “geek”. She’s a keen blogger and recenly moved down to London from Nottingham.

Entry #5 – What Small Businesses Need From Search Marketers

Author: Mary Bowling
Title: Director of Search Marketing at SEOoverflow
About: Mary has been an internet marketer since 2003 and has a particular keen interest in all aspects of Local Search marketing. Mary is a regular speaker at Search conferences such as SMX and SES and lives in Denver (US).

Update: I do actually have a blog now: JaneCopland.co.uk

While this would have been a neat post to kick off my new domain (which currently boasts no content. At all), I must admit to not wanting a personal blog. In the traditional sense of the name, a personal blog tends to be a vanity domain of some sort (check) that a writer uses to document his or her life. Twitter without the weight limit. I like the professional-personal blog style a lot better. Bloggers taking this approach don’t write about what they cooked for dinner or whether their heating bill went up last month. People like Dean Chew and Kate Morris, who tagged me in this “7 things” series, combine their personal voices with professional subjects. I’m not even sure that I want my site to be a blog at all, but this could have at least been its About page!

However, I’m quite busy right now, moving to another country and thus I still don’t have a site of my own. What I do have, however, are seven small stories about myself. And who doesn’t like the sound of their fingers tapping away about themselves?

1. I swam 800m without stopping when I was three.
   It was the day before I turned four, but I swam sixteen lengths of Dunedin’s 50m Moana pool, non-stop, when I was still three years old. Just over twelve years later, I would win my first national open swimming medal in the same pool in the women’s individual medley. It was silver.
2. Eleven of my 24 birthdays have taken place “overseas.”
   Due to summer swimming competitions in Australia often taking place at the end of January, I spent my 12th, 13th, 14th and 16th birthdays in Sydney. Birthdays 19 through 24 were spent in the United States. I will fly to the United Kingdom to live the day after my 25th birthday.
3. My family lived in the Caribbean for two years.
   In April 2003, my father began working on the island of St. Croix, sixty miles from Puerto Rico in the U.S. Virgin Islands. It was a huge change from New Zealand. The island was very strange. On every second corner, there was devastating poverty, boredom and disrepair, but around the next, there were resorts and restaurants and orange drinks with pink umbrellas. My parents’ condo had a swimming pool, and on the other side of the swimming pool’s fence, a beach and the Caribbean Sea. However, three blocks away, there were knife crimes and derelict government buildings whose windows and doors had been blown in during a hurricane that took place in 1989. It was 85 degrees Fahrenheit at five o’clock in the morning, the mosquitoes were relentless and no amount of rum could kill the feeling of isolation in civilisation.

   This said, we had some fantastic times there. The rum! My God. The island is home to the Cruzan distillery, which makes highly-rated, award winning rum that I can finally find in the Northwest. It’s amazingly cheap at Christiansted bars. In fact, low-end stuff is so cheap that a Rum-and-Coke contains less Coke than rum because the Coke costs more. The beaches are as good as they are in the television commercials for Royal Caribbean cruises (even though cruise ships stopped coming to St. Croix years ago). My parents will tell different stories about St. Croix because they actually stayed there for the majority of those two years, whilst I came and went during university holidays. Good and bad, however, living in the Virgin Islands is something I’m really glad I did.

4. The first time I arrived in the U.S. was the day I moved here.
   I have a habit of doing that: packing my things and moving across the world. Well no, I’ve done it once and I don’t plan on doing it again for a while after I do it this once more. However, it is true that I’d never visited North America before I arrived in Seattle in August 2002 to go to university. I’d been to a majority of Western European countries (seriously), four or five places in Asia and a small collection of South Pacific islands. America, however, was unchartered, so what better way than to get to know these United States than to move to them?
5. I can be a bit of a wimp, but
   the most satisfying thing I ever said to someone who’d hurt me was to the former national coach of New Zealand swimming. When I was fifteen, he’d told me late one night after a long day of travelling that I’d never amount to anything as a swimmer due to a lack of physical ability and a bad personal coach. I should, he said, quit, as I was going to end up an embarrassment to New Zealand swimming. I was, to put it mildly, completely destroyed. We were well-conditioned to fear and admire and respect this guy, and he had a lot of power. He was a buddy-buddy, call me by my first name type on the surface, but he was nothing of the sort underneath. No official should have that sort of influence, but he did.

   Eight months later, at the meet where I won my first national medal at Moana pool, I noticed this national coach making his way to me across the pool deck. We were going to meet face-to-face. He’d opened his mouth, big cocky smile attached, to say hello. But really, fuck that. I wasn’t even going to let him get the “h” out. “I think,” I said, as I moved slightly to the right to pass him by, “that you and I should maintain our distance. Mr. Naylor.”

   The next time he spoke to me was two years later, presenting me with a gold medal at another national championship. He offered me a half-hearted, “congratulations”, but I like to think he was actually saying, “I was wrong.”

6. I’m crazy about Top Gear.
   This is well known to my friends and a number of the people who follow me on Twitter. I really love the British TV show featuring Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May and would give up a minor holiday (but not Christmas) to go to a filming. It’s one of the more popular shows in the UK and has quite a following abroad, but given that I don’t watch much television, my love of Top Gear is out of the ordinary. I have an unimaginable crush on Richard Hammond and can accurately recall the outcome of most of their challenges, especially those which involve cross-city or cross-country races. I didn’t even notice when Jeremy made those terrible lorrie-driver-prostitute-killer jokes at the beginning of Season 12. Why were so many people surprised? It’s Jeremy!
7. Despite the places I’ve lived and my dislike of my accent, I’m a proud, and typical, Kiwi.
   We don’t go home much and we hold residencies, citizenships and visas for numerous countries. I really don’t like my accent. However, we bore our friends by pointing out New Zealand wine and beer in the supermarket and we stay up all night to watch any New Zealand-related event on TV. We only figure out what New Zealand’s like once we’ve not lived there for a decade and then we’re sort of fascinated by it. I get a lot of shit for having lived all over the place and now having a ticket to somewhere else, but where I come, I’m just normal. We do this. So I’ll keep saying “sweet as” and not understand why you want to know what is comparably sweet, but the next international plane ticket I have is to Heathrow.

And now to tag some other people:

Lisa Ditlefsen
@LisaDitlefsen

Julie Joyce
@juliejoyce

Rob Kerry (who probably won’t do it, the lazy bastard)
@evilgreenmonkey

Ciaran Norris
@ciaranj

Tom Critchlow
@tomcritchlow

Kalena Jordan
@kalena

Michael Motherwell
@motherwell

I’m speaking at the free conference W-Tech about Managing your Online Profile. I do hope you’ll come for the evening networking if not the day of talks as well.  Not only are tons of businesses hiring, i-level is hiring too (including jobs not listed on the site) and I’ll be happy to let you know about the company and what jobs we have on offer.  Since this is a day about work and jobs for women, it got me thinking about my personal experiences of discrimination within IT as a woman and what I’ve done to overcome them.

One thing I’ve had to overcome is the sense that I need to have mastered all skills required for a job in order to apply for it.  Most employers do not expect an applicant to match the skill set exactly and most men will apply for a job if they have 50% of the skills required.  A woman will only apply if she has mastered 80% of them.  A re-education is required on both sides but that is one reason there are less women in IT.  If job descriptions were crafted with this in mind, more women would be captured by focusing on only core essential requirements and focusing on what is actually needed.  Many jobs are currently a wishlist employers know will never be filled.  I blogged about these kinds of jobs, praising reasonable ones and mocking unreasonable ones.

One of the things that continues to shock, annoy and anger me is the disparity in pay between men and women for the same work.  When comparing like to like – so a marketing director to a marketing director, women are *still* paid less than men for doing the same job.  I was shown an article in, I believe, the times saying the Equality Commission was guilty of paying women less than men for doing the same job.

If you look around, you’ll see a variety of excuses being made about why women make less than men for the same job, including lifestyle choice.  Problem with that is that comparing job with job and ignoring age women are still paid less. Worse yet, sometimes the reason is a lie.

One problem I have found, reiterated by my wonderful boss at Gordano is that women are less likely to ask for a raise.  They may feel grateful or even that the boss will be equitable and offer a fair raise if the woman is deserving.  One thing I learned from my specialised honours degree in psychology is that women are more likely to go for a lower skilled job they can do easily, rather than risk failure at a more difficult one.

Don’ let these things be barriers for you.  Be aware and push beyond them and make sure you are being paid what you are worth.  You have experience, knowledge, expertise and drive. Don’t let anyone undervalue you.  Come join me and over 400 other women already going to W-Tech 2009 and find just what you deserve!

Just so it is clear, I love working at i-level.  It is about as close to my dream job as I am going to get.  I work with a group of fab people, in a great area, in fantastic offices and I’m having a blast.  I cannot emphasise enough how much I love working at i-level and I’d recommend working here to everyone!

Ok,so I was going to leave it, not going to get all het up about it. But nah….I’m a Viking, my brain explodes if I don’t say what I think.

SEO Chicks has been going now since June 2007, ok so 1 ½ years isn’t THAt long, but in the blogging world we could have already come and gone. SEO Chicks has done really well (or so we like to think), the bloggers we now have on board are fantastic. Our reputation has grown and our goal has been achieved, yep we are chicks and we know search ;p

When I first looked for domains for the blog I was quite set on wanting to call it “SEO Chicks”, but the domain seochicks.com was taken, it had been bought a while back but nothing was on it. I had to make a decision, should I think of another name or should I chance it? I chanced it and bought seo-chicks both .com and .co.uk But it HAD to bite me in the ass one day, I’m not stupid, I knew it would. But I remain the right to still get pissed off about it (I’m a woman after all). The people that own SEOChicks.com has now finally decided to go live with something on the domain BUT funnily enough the site has pretty much the same colours as ours (ok so a different shade of green)! And It’s 5 women offering SEO, PPC, Social Media etc, but as opposed to blogging about it they are actually offering out their services. But I can’t help but feel a bit cheated, that they are jumping on the success of the “brand” that we worked hard to build. Although SEO Chicks was never meant to be an agency or similar, they aren’t technically saying they are us, but it’s still a bit cunning. I must admit I’m not keen on people thinking these are THE SEO Chicks. Maybe I should buy “THEseochicks.com”, oh wait, I just did!

Ok I will stop moaning now, I just want to make it clear to everyone that seochicks.com has nothing to do with THE SEO Chicks.

Cause we’re the real SEO Chicks, yes we’re the real SEO Chicks
All you other SEO Chicks are just imitating
So won’t the real SEO Chicks please stand up!
Please stand up, please stand up?