Coverage of SES Chicago will continue.  Stay with WebProNews for more notes from the event this week.

Maile Ohye, Senior Developer Programs Engineer, Google, offered advice on how to optimize your site in a Q&A session keynote.

Ask yourself if your website is helping your customers and users. Do you have relevant content?

Reviews and user-generated content is an opportunity for your site to rank in Google.

When it comes to links, optimize your site for your users first and then focus on links. There is nothing you can do about old links. “If users find links valuable, then search engines will too,” said Ohye.

Is it better to be an older website? It’s good to have an established business, but if you have buzz and links you can build on that. It does help to have age because your website is more established.

Google does not have a “trust rank” so don’t be obsessed with it. If your site has a value add you can compete.

Google Caffeine has nothing to do with ranking, it was a major infrastructure change that allowed Google to process more documents. It led to a 50% fresher index.

Webmaster Central is where you can go to get questions answered about your website.

Look at conversions and rankings for items you want to sell. Sign up for site alerts. Google will message you about any problems about your site – hacking, malware etc.

To sell more or convert look at your site and search query data. Look at what your site ranks for and focus on that for SEO. Look at terms and where they rank. You may run into duplicate content issues.  Look at your search results to see where you rank.

Keywords. See where they rank in webmaster tools. And shift or adjust from there.