Vanessa Fox. Nude.

As some of you may know, I’m working with Ignition Partners, a venture capital firm here in Seattle, as an entrepreneur in residence. I have been having a fantastic time looking into the online marketing space, talking to people about their challenges and about what excites them most in learning about their customers. I love working with online marketing, looking at things from new angles, and solving problems. And I have lots of ideas about where things could go next.

I’m forming a company around these ideas (although I’m not ready to talk about the details just yet) and am looking for just the right people to join me. If you like getting in on the ground floor of cool new stuff, have a developer background or online marketing background (beyond SEO), and want to talk more, let me know!

And if you’re working for a company that would like to get a new perspective on online marketing strategy, or simply talk through your issues and needs, ping me on that too.

You can reach me at vanessafox at gmail dot com.

Fit neither of those camps but just want to know what the heck we’re up to? Watch this space.

Last week, I decided to try the new survey feature of Google Docs. It has some slick features, particularly in that it compiles the results to a spreadsheet automatically, but it also has a few, er, idiosyncrasies.

Open in a New Tab?
The most irritating thing, which is surely a bug, is this. You click on the spreadsheet from the docs list. It opens in another tab. Then from that tab, you go to another page. Perhaps you start to compose a blog post. Then you switch back over to the docs list and click the spreadsheet again to open it. It opens in the tab where it was previous open, rather than a new tab. Perhaps this is the tab that contains your newly composed blog post. Or did contain before that content was replaced with the spreadsheet, wiping out all of your writing. Ahem.

Anonymous Results
Another thing that I suppose makes senses but isn’t clear up front is that you can send the survey to a list of email addresses, but the survey results are anonymous. So my question asking if the respondent is willing to do a follow up survey? Not all that useful to me. I’ve since added a new field asking for that email address.

Limited Question Types
Two things I really needed in my survey but that Google Docs didn’t have were:

• An ordered list (rank a list in order of importance)
• An “other” choice with a text field (so respondents could write in additional answers)

No Custom Email Messages
You can send the form out via email, but any text you write ends up as part of the form. You can’t send a separate email message as you can with other types of Google docs.

Overall all though, the survey was easy to put together and it’s easy to see the responses. I can’t seem to manipulate things much in Google Docs, so I’ll likely have to export to Excel. It would be nice, for instance, if my single-choice answers had graphs or pie charts displayed by default that showed distribution. Instead, I just have a non-compiled laundry list of answers. You can now add Gadgets to spreadsheets, and likely one of these does what I want, but I’d like to have some of that functionality built in. Not that I’m saying I’m lazy.

If you’d like to take my survey about how you approach and measure your online marketing activities, you can check it out here. All results are anonymous. Unless you fill out the newly added email question. Which, like the rest of the survey questions, is entirely optional.

This is the second part of my multi-part series on link building as part of a larger online marketing effort. In part one, I talked about the various facets of the overall value of links. If you’re unsure of what to do with the myriad of signals people talk about regarding links, just concentrate one thing: what links provide the best traffic? All the linking signals can be rolled up into that one metric.

I find that the best way to start any online marketing effort, link building included, is assessing where things currently are.

What links do you really have?
You can use Yahoo! Site Explorer and Google Webmaster Tools to get a general idea of the number of links to your site and where they’re coming from. I like that Site Explorer (supposedly) ranks the links in order of importance, and I like that Google lets you download the links so you can open them in Excel. Yahoo! shows more of a full count, but only lists 1,000. Google may not have the complete list of links, but lets you see (and download) the full list they do show.

Note that Excel 2007 lets you load up to a million rows, but earlier versions only let you see up to 65,000 (ish), so if you have more than 65,000 external links and want to view them in Excel, you might want to spring for the upgrade.

In Site Explorer, make sure you change the Inlinks options to “Except from this domain” and “to Entire site” to get an accurate picture of your external links.

From the list, filter out the links that search engines could potentially be devaluing or discounting entirely. This includes links that are paid or the result of link networks or exchanges, links that generate no traffic to your site, other sites that you own, and spammy directories. Then consolidate multiple links from a single site. What’s left? For some sites, things can initially look pretty good, but once you filter and consolidate, you find that you’re left with much fewer links than you had thought.

(I find this exercise is sometimes useful when people ask me why a competitor site ranks above them when the competitor site has fewer links. There are lots of reasons this could be, of course, but one of them might be that once you subtract the number of potentially discounted links from the total, you end up with fewer than the competition.)

Your Most Compelling Content And Your Target Audience
From the remaining list, what types of sites are linking to you and what types of content are they linking to most often? Easy ways to get links are to:

• create more content like that which is already being linked to (people are clearly interested in that kind of content).
• target other sites in the same categories that link to you already (those types of sites have audiences who are interested in your content).

Your Biggest Fans
Make a list of who is linking to you that would link again if you had something new to talk about (like bloggers and reporters). Without doing link analysis, you may have no idea who’s out there talking about you! Make sure to ping them about new features and content.

What links bring the most traffic?
You can get this information from your web analytics. Determining what links bring more visitors can help you with audience analysis. What sites have audiences that are most interested in your content? Don’t just look at page views, look at bounce rates, time on site, and number of pages viewed. What audiences are most actively engaged?

What social media sites bring the best traffic? Again, those sites are more likely to cater to your target audience.

Looking at my referrals, for instance, the StumbleUpon audience seems to be a good one for this site. They have a super low bounce rate of 37%, stay on the site for over a minute, and look at nearly two pages while they’re here. Compare that to the Reddit audience, who have a bounce rate of 92% and spend only 13 seconds on the site.

Who’s linking to your competition and why?
Use Yahoo! Site Explorer to check out your competitors’ links. What kinds of content of theirs is linked to most often? Maybe your site doesn’t fill a need that theirs does. What kinds of sites are linking to them and not to you? Those are audiences interested in your topic who may not yet know you exist.

Anchor text: What are your external links saying about you?
What does your anchor text look like? (You can get an anchor text report from Google Webmaster Tools, as well as from third-party tools.) Search engines use a combination of on page and off page factors to determine what your site is about.

In the next segment of this series, I’ll talk about ways to influence external anchor text to your site, but during the assessment phase, just make note of what the anchor text looks like. If you don’t have any anchor text for keywords that you care about, that may partially explain why you’re not ranking the way you’d like to, and even why those external links aren’t bringing the traffic you’d like. Ideally, the anchor text compels people to click the link and visit your site.

As the result of this assessment, you should have the following lists for the next phase in the link building process:

• Types of sites that tend to link to you
• Types of content on your site that is linked to most often
• Reporters, bloggers, and others who seem interested in your content, your competition, or your industry/topic
• Types of sites that tend to link to your competition
• Types of content that the competition provides that is linked to most often
• Anchor text and where it’s coming from

Yep, link building is a long and arduous process. But if you’re building links for long-term value, it’s well worth it. The next post in this series will be about preparing your site. Stay tuned!

I’ll be in Dublin in a couple of weeks, speaking at Search Marketing World and I’m staying a few extra days to hang out with friends. I was looking for a hotel downtown and did a Google search for the best hotel to stay in downtown dublin.

Apparently, it’s the Leeson Inn.

(In case you see different search results than I do, 8 of the top 10 results are for that hotel.)

I can’t imagine this is the result of search engine manipulation, since all kinds of sites are showing up, including Yahoo! and Trip Advisor, which as far as I know, are separately owned. (Although in this age of user-contributed content, I suppose we could be seeing a new era of review manipulation for SEO purposes, as Larry points out in the comments.)

Is the Leeson Inn really the definitive answer to my question?

Today, I gave a talk about link building and focused particularly on:

• Understanding what links are most valuable
• Link analysis: assessing where you’re at now
• The importance of anchor text and how to get the text you want most

The easiest way to get valuable links (yes, it’s exactly what you think)

This is the first part of a series of posts to recap what we talked about.

Years ago, I worked in marketing for a small startup. I didn’t really know a lot about marketing then, so it was a great experience for me. Since our marketing department consisted of two people, we had no silos. I created the web site, wrote brochures, auditioned “talent” for manning our conference booth, worked with agencies on product packaging, organized events, and placed ads in magazines.

One thing I learned is that everything that is customer-facing can be marketing. I wouldn’t have thought of product packaging as marketing, but of course, it very much is. When you’re in the grocery store trying to decide what cereal to pick, the box itself probably influences just as much as those multi-million dollar TV ads you may have seen.

Marketing on the web is no different. In many cases, the web site is the product and the packaging can be anything that frames that product for the consumer, including the links into it.

Your goal in link building should be to present your product where you audience is likely to see it and be interested in it (your box of cereal will find a much more interested buyer base on the cereal aisle than with the beer and wine), and to present it in a compelling way that makes your audience want to grab it off the shelf. I mean click on the link. Possibly I’m taking the cereal metaphor too far.

What Links Are Most Valuable?
People often ask me (and today’s lunch was no exception) about the weighting of various algorithmic factors with links. Is it better to get a link from the home page of a site than a subpage? How much credit do you get from internal links vs. external ones? Is a link from a PageRank 9 site eight times better than one from a PageRank 6 site or twelve times better?

I always answer the same way, quite possibly to the exasperation of everyone around me. The algorithms change all the time. That signal that used to count for 22% will count for 25% tomorrow and then 18% the day after that. If you chase after algorithms all day, you will lose your mind, end up joining a traveling band of harmonica players, and telling the world that you have been to the tubes and they were indeed clogged full of poker chips. No one wants that.

Even if you managed to get Matt Cutts to take a break from Sprite long enough to do some tequila shots so that he said what the hell and sketched out the complete algorithm on a napkin, you wouldn’t want to define your link strategy based on his scribblings. Because your strategy would fail as soon as the algorithms were tweaked. Which would be the same day Matt was waking up from his hangover, wondering when his Sprite got so salty and limey.

Instead, you want to build your strategy based on what the algorithms are trying to accomplish — because that won’t change any time soon. And for now, the search engines are using links as one method of figuring out what pages on the web are the most useful, valuable, and relevant for any given query.

Which means that the best links are ones that:

• Are from authoritative sites (a link from the NY Times is more valuable than a link from the Tahlequah Daily Press.
• Are relevant (a link from a knitting blog to your online yarn store is more valuable than a link from a fishing blog)
• Use keywords in the anchor text for queries you want to rank for (A link to your Maine vacation rental is more valuable if the anchor text is “summer vacation rental home in Maine” than “click here”)
• Bring you actual traffic.

New sites in particular are eager to build links because they aren’t ranking well for anything. If you build the right kind of links, you will not only boost your rankings over time, but you’ll get a steady influx of traffic to tide you over until the boost happens (and will keep bringing you relevant visitors long term).

The subsequent posts in this series will detail the basic steps of link building. In the meantime, here are some links on links.

• Previous posts on my blog:
Live(ish) blogging of the SMX West Linking panel
• Recap of my viral linking webinar
• Making your site discoverable
• Search Engine Land: linking columns | link building articles
• SEOmoz link building category
• Debra Mastaler’s Link Spiel blog

On Tuesday, I gave a webinar on how businesses can use social networking to learn about their customers, deepen their relationships with customers, and provide more effective and responsive customer service.

You can view the archived version of the webinar for free. When you click that link, it looks like it’s for registration of the event that already happened, but if you step through the registration process, it’ll bring you to the archived video.

In the webinar, I talked about how your customers are likely already online talking about your brand and your industry. The web is full of all kinds of community-driven sites where you can listen to what your customers are saying and can get involved. I talked a bit about setting up a social media program in your company, and some things to consider as you get started, as well as getting engaged in the conversation, improving customer relationships, and benefiting from the feedback.

Monitoring the conversation
In the comments to the previous post, someone asked what tools I recommend for tracking conversations about you online. That really depends on your situation. If you have a large brand and time is more valuable than money, you might consider hiring an agency to track and aggregate the conversations for you. A service such as TruCast compiles conversations, scores them, and, and provides workflow management for responses.

You can set up various searches and alerts or use a product like Andy Beal’s new Trackur to aggregate those searches for you.

Aaron Wall recently wrote an article for Search Engine Land about reputation monitoring tools that provides more details about setting up alerts.

Below are some ideas for a free, low-tech way to get started if you want to try setting things up yourself. You can set up all kinds of searches about your brand, your competitors, your industry — just about anything you want to track. Here are some places you might get started.

Google Alerts
Google Alerts tracks web search, Google Groups, Google News, Google Video, and Google Blogsearch.

Unfortunately, Google Alerts can only be sent to your email, and aren’t available via RSS. If you have the alerts sent to a Gmail address and you assign those emails a label using filtering, you should be able to then subscribe to the RSS feed of that label using an RSS aggregator that supports authenticated RSS (using the feed format https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom/labelname/), but I haven’t been able to get that to work.

You can also set up separate searches for each of these and with some of them, for instance, Google Blogsearch, you can set the search up as an RSS feed. For Google Blogsearch, just do the search, then click the Subscribe link you want on the left.

Google web search has some interesting advanced options. For instance, to get web search results for a topic that have appeared within the last 24 hours, you can choose Advanced Search from the Google home page, then expand the date options. Set up the parameters you want, then click the Advanced Search button.

Twitter
I normally suggest people track Twitter conversations with Terraminds, but it’s currently down and I’m not sure when it will be back up. You can set up tracking directly in Twitter, but Terraminds is nice because you can subscribe to the RSS feed of the searches and you don’t need a Twitter account. To track a search term on Twitter, simply sign up for Twitter, then send the message “track

At 10am pacific (about 45 minutes from now!), I’ll be giving a webinar on how companies can start having conversations with their customers online to learn more about them, create stronger relationships, and improve both their product offerings and customer loyalty.

Come check it out.

I’m pretty sure that link will also work once the webinar is archived so you can view it later. You probably won’t still be able to ask questions though. Although you can ask them in comments here for a slightly less-than-real time response.

I recently came across a post Alex Bosworth did a while back called “Google is destroying the web and you don’t even know it” in which he said:

“Unfortunately this [that everyone uses Google for search, and therefore online businesses need to be found on Google] means you need to do Search Engine Optimization. SEO is the worst thing ever invented. It’s destroying good web application development.”

I hesitate to even post on this because the “SEO is evil personified” argument has been rehashed to death. For instance, see this post on Search Engine Land that recaps several of the recent debates. Jeremy Schoemaker doesn’t like 95% of SEOs. Jason Calacanis thinks SEOs are snake oil salesmen. This idea of SEO as evil certainly isn’t new.

And his post is from last October, so it’s not new either, but it’s gotten some renewed interest online and I do think it’s still the case that many people don’t think of SEO as part of marketing. They think of it as a necessary evil rather than part of a larger strategy.

I do think that as businesses move online, more and more site owners are going to have the perspective that Alex has and I think that understanding how search engine optimization fits into a holistic marketing plan is important for the long-term vitality of businesses who want to participate in the online space.

So.

What Do I Know, Anyway?
First, let me back way, way up and provide some context on my perspective. My background is in communication. I have spent years working on communicating effectively with your target audience. My degree is in English. After college, I worked on corporate policy: making sure both corporate and store employees knew everything they needed about whatever their jobs entailed — whether that was creating marketing programs, buying fixed assets, or processed defective merchandise. And I did it in whatever ways worked best: written documentation, in-person training classes, software systems (as long as those software systems worked on AS/400 and didn’t require the internet — this was the early 90s after all).

Later, I worked in marketing. I started building web sites, starting with my company’s in 1995. I also spent years writing documentation for developers, doing audience analysis, and thinking about user interfaces (whether those were windows or SDKs), product strategy, and everything involved with a better experience for customers.

Much, much later, as many of you know, I was was the product manager for Google Webmaster Central and really dove into both the search engine perspective and the site owner perspective on search engine optimization. A big part of the search engine perspective is the searcher perspective, so when I look at the SEO issue I’m looking from a point of triangulation. I understand that searchers want the best result as quickly as possible; I understand that search engines want to understand the web so they can deliver the most relevant results; and I understand that site owners want to market their content effectively to the right audience.

While I was at Google and since I’ve left, I’ve reviewed countless sites for SEO troubleshooting, customer engagement, usability, and overall strategy. I’ve spoken and written about all varieties of online marketing: from technical infrastructure problems in the context of SEO to social media engagement.

Which is to say, I have an opinion about online marketing, particularly as it relates to search engine optimization.

The Age Old Debate: Build For Users Or For Search Engines
In his piece, Alex said:

“If you want a huge amount of traffic, the way to get it is not through community features, it is not through great writing and content development, but it is through optimizing the crap out of your site so that Google will send more and more searchers your way. Now the most important thing to you is no longer, “how can I make my site better to use”.”

Sigh. In my view, this misses the point entirely. Yes, most people on the internet find sites through searching. So, yes, you can get a lot of traffic if you rank highly for relevant keywords. But traffic alone is meaningless. You have to look at traffic + engagement. Traffic + bounce rate. Unless your entire goal with the site is to monetize through CPM-based ads on the home page, your site needs to be compelling to the searchers who land there so that they’ll stay. In other words, if you abandon great writing and content development, if you neglect the question of how to make the site better to use, you are simply being short-sighted and are ignoring all the rules of marketing. That’s not Google’s fault. That’s your own fault for not looking at the right metrics.

If you “optimize the crap” out of your site so that you rank #1 for relevant keywords, but your site isn’t compelling to searchers, that ranking will be completely meaningless as those new visitors will click right back to the search results rather than engage with your site.

He then said:

“Do you think having your site name in your page title is a good idea? Google doesn’t.”

I generally don’t like to speak in absolutes, much less speak for Google since I no longer work there, but I can definitely say that this statement is completely false. Google does think having your site name in your page title is a good idea. Of course you want your company name in your title and it makes no sense at all that Google wouldn’t also want you to be found in searches for your company name. But take Google out of the equation for a minute and think of your customers. They’re searching for something. Using words.

Imagine you have a paint store — an actual physical store on the street. And just imagine for a moment there is no internet (it isn’t hard to do). You want people to come to your store to buy paint. You might get customers who see your sign as they drive by or they might look you up in the yellow pages or perhaps you run TV or radio ads. If your store is called “Buffy’s Store” then how the hell do you expect those people driving by to have any idea what you store might contain? You sit there, with your brushes and your rollers and your five gallon buckets and you wonder where everyone is. Then try changing your sign to “Buffy’s Paint Store” and see if your customer traffic patterns improve.

Making your title descriptive isn’t evil Google oppression. It’s common sense.

“Do you think that javascript widget you made for navigating your archives is really awesome, intuitive and innovative? Google disagrees, it thinks it’s a big black hole of nothing.”

Yes, search engines need to evolve and get better at crawling new web technologies. But so do mobile browsers and screen readers. If you want your site to be accessible, you have to make it easy for your audience. I access the web on my phone A LOT. And if I’m trying to navigate your site and all the menus are in javascript so that I can’t get to them on my mobile browser, I can guarantee you that I’m not thinking about how awesome, intuitive, and innovative you are. And I bet blind people aren’t either.

I have had this exact experience several times over the last few weeks — once while stranded at a Caltrain station, trying to figure out when the next train was coming and I can tell you that I was not looking for innovation in my Caltrain menu. I was looking for information. It is not difficult to gracefully degrade your site so that anyone who is visiting it with a browser that doesn’t support your fancy technology can still access your content. If you are a good web developer, and I’m sure you are, you can build your site in a way that is both innovative and universally easy to access.

“And your user community might even die, but who cares, comparatively they are a tiny minority of your overall user base. You’re too busy dealing with scaling your servers to cope with the millions of hits coming from Google to care about those ten thousand monthly visits from loyal users.”

I admit, I don’t understand this at all. What exactly does he want with those millions of hits if not to add them into the user community? I really don’t get it. Is he building a site or creating a made for AdSense page? He’s complaining that Google is sending him too much traffic and thus it’s somehow Google’s fault that he’s chosen to ignore audience engagement? It’s completely baffling to me.

The bottom line is this. Yes, if you want your customers to find you using search, then you have to understand search engine optimization. And you should want your customers to find you using search because search is the entry point on the web. But if you are operating an online business, you absolutely should understand online marketing. I don’t understand people who say it should all just work and they should be able to concentrate on their core business. (Looking at this from a search engine’s perspective, however, I think they should and certainly they are working on ways to make sure it all just works, because it’s in their best interest to provide searchers the best content on the web, whether the owners of that content understand SEO or not, but that doesn’t negate the point.)

If you have an offline business, you have to understand offline marketing and customer engagement. If you are opening new stores and your core skill set is painting, you will likely hire others for other aspects of your business: determining the best location for the store, branding and advertising, merchandising. You will probably ensure your store is attractive, both inside and outside. You’ll arrange merchandise on your shelves so that people know where to find stuff and can easily reach it. You’ll make your aisles wide enough for carts.

You wouldn’t open your paint store with no sign and a broken door in a back alley that had a brick wall blocking the road. Why would you do the same on the internet and then blame Google?

I’m at SMX West and I’m actually attending a panel, rather than moderating! Woo hoo! I moderated seven sessions on Tuesday and Wednesday, which was super awesome and I’m totally blogging how it all went, but for now, I’m finally in the audience for a session, so you’re hearing about that first!

Before I get started with my mad live blogging skilz, I thought I’d share a little story. Throughout the session, the panelists would sometimes listen to another answer and then thoughtfully chime in “Google agrees with that”. Well, not if it was the Microsoft rep. He would say “Ask agrees with that.” Because that’s funnier. Anyway. What’s up with all the serious agreeing?

Well, if you’ve been to search conferences in the past and you’ve seen Eytan Seidman from Microsoft on a panel, he would sometimes save everyone time and confusion by seriously commenting “Microsoft agrees with that” after another search engine rep would answer. Efficient and concise, yes. But also funny!

Eytan recently left Microsoft Live Search and several of his search friends, including Rand Fishkin from SEOmoz and Matt Cutts and Maile Ohye of Google showed their love for him by mocking his search conference answering techniques on video. I could describe it, but really, you should just watch it. Here’s a very short clip. .

I know, what the hell was Matt talking about? Seriously, you should just watch the entire video, which is 15 minutes long, and doesn’t have much to do with linking, and it will all make sense.

And now, onto the live blogging! Which at some point became trying-to-remember-after-the-fact blogging as my battery died.

Paid Links? No One Cares About That Topic, Right?
Any of you who are involved in search at all will be shocked and amazed to hear that the discussion focused largely on paid links. Crazy! Who would have thought! For those of you who aren’t in search and are thinking what the heck are paid links, you might check out a I wrote a post on Search Engine Land a while back that summarized the world of paid links throughout 2007.

Reps from all the engines are on the panel, and as it turns out, Matt Cutts is against paid links! And wants everyone to use nofollow! Rae Hoffman is representing search marketers on the panel (along with Todd Malicoat) and wants to know why search engines, after creating a link economy, are putting all the responsibility on webmasters to figure out when to use nofollow. (It certainly is the case that lots of people with websites have never even heard of nofollow and yet the engines are expecting them to use it.) All the engines say they’re working on it! Stop being so mean! And Rae is all, well stop banning me then! That’s even meaner! And then there was a duel.

Am I kidding? If you were here, you would know.

Link Sabotage! Not Impossible! But Really Hard!
Someone then asked if link sabotage is possible. Rae’s like, heck yeah! Matt said, well, it’s not “impossible”, because maybe nothing is impossible. But it’s really frickin’ hard. Todd and Rae looked unconvinced.

But It’s Scary To Change Domains
Someone asked about moving a site, and everyone on the panel spent lots of lots of time trying to one-up each other with the best tip. Oh, you want to know what they are? Right then.

• Always use 301 redirects when moving pages.
• Don’t change the site content and infrastructure at the same time you change domains. I know, I know! It’s tempting! You think that since you’re rebranding the site, you should just go for the full rebrand all at once. But see, the search engines get confused easily and if the old page matches the new page, they don’t get lost and wander around. If the new page is totally different, they just get all flustered and distracted and it may take them a while to figure things out. Move the pages, make sure the new ones are ranking in the place of the old ones, and then start any redesign efforts.
• This is really part of the last bullet, but the suggestion not to change content? Really don’t do it. If the new pages aren’t ranking and you’ve changed the content, it’ll be hard to know if the ranking change is because the move didn’t happen correctly from a technical perspective or if the search engine no longer thinks the page is about what it was before.
• Move a section at a time if you can. This way, you make sure you’re doing everything correctly, and if you do experience a temporary ranking dip, it’ll be for only a portion of your site rather than the whole thing. Once the section seems to be ranking where it should be, start moving another section.
• If you aren’t experienced at this kind of thing, hire a professional to help! Nathan Buggia of Microsoft Live Search recommended hiring an SEO for this kind of major effort. I know! A search engine recommending an SEO! We can all get along after all! After this part of the session, the SEOs and search reps all joined hands and bought the world a Coke! And then flowers rained down from the sky. You so should have been there.
• If the domain name change is part of a company name change, make sure the old company name still appears in your content. This can be as easy as a sentence that says something like “My Awesome Company, formerly called My Mediocre Company…” The thing is, the site likely got a fair amount of traffic from the site name and if that name no longer appears anyone on the site, all those rankings are gone and that traffic is lost. Plus, your loyal customers from before the switch might feel all confused and forsaken. The panelists didn’t mention this tip; I’m just throwing it in as a bonus.

User-Generated Content Links: Can They Be More Than Links You Give Yourself?
What about links from user-generated content? Todd said that if you have a balance of links, you’ll be OK. If 100% of your links are from user-generated content, then the engines just might think you’re signing up for every social site in the world, sitting at home drinking Mad Dog 20/20 and eating cheetos, and staying up all night just adding comment after comment with a link to your site. And seriously, Mad Dog 20/20 just doesn’t go well with cheetos.

Does It Matter Who You Link To?
Matt said if you’re linking out to scuzzy, spammy sites, Google might think you’re hanging out with friends who are a bad influence on you. Just like your mom always told you.

Should you link out at all? Todd said this isn’t discussed much, but is pretty important. Who you’re linking to can tell search engines about your site as well as get those other sites’ attention. Rae said outlink when it makes sense for the user. The search engine reps were so proud they could barely stand it.

Sure, search engine optimization is important, but users are what you’re ultimately after anyway, so your primary goal is to make them happy. Without them, what’s the point? It’ll just be you and your page of lolcats. And that would be a sad internet indeed.