Vanessa Fox

Vanessa spends her time writing, speaking, and training companies on how to use key pieces of data to better drive product strategy and customer engagement online.

She previously worked at Google and built Webmaster Central, which provides tools, information, and community for site owners about how their sites are performing in Google’s search engine. She also was instrumental in the sitemaps.org alliance of Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft Live Search.

She spent much of the 90s writing technical documentation for developers and spent a number of years managing feature and user interface development for a variety of consumer and enterprise-level products. In 1995, she built her first corporate web site. She was deeply involved in the tech industry discussion around the move from print to online (particularly as it related to user documentation, training, and marketing). She has run a number of online discussion forums and helped build several online communities.

Vanessa is now involved in a number of projects focused on improving our experiences on the web. She is a sought-after writer and speaker and is highly skilled at navigating airport security.

Vanessa Fox, called a “cyberspace visionary” by Seattle Business Monthly, is an expert in understanding customer acquisition from organic search. She shares her perspective on how this impacts marketing and user experience at ninebyblue.com and provides authoritative search-friendly design patterns for developers at janeandrobot.com. She’s also an entrepreneur-in-residence with Ignition Partners, Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land, and host of the weekly podcast Office Hours. She previously created Google’s Webmaster Central, which provides both tools and community to help website owners improve their sites to gain more customers from search and was instrumental in the sitemaps.org alliance of Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft Live Search. She was recently named one of Seattle’s 2008 top 25 innovators and entrepreneurs. Look for her book Marketing in the Age of Google in early 2010.