Advice to jump into SEO world?
Don't be scared. The more time you spend on it, the better you get. And I've seen that happen with AdWords. It's the exact same way with SEO.
There are all these free resources out there. Forums. Google Webmaster Central. Prove that you own a site, and then we'll give you all kinds of states. Test out your robots.txt.
Some people accidentally ban all robots from indexing their site.
Google has a local business center. If you're a brick-and-mortar business, you can show up for free in Google Local and Google Maps. This helps us, and it helps you, because you can be found.
Sometimes the map shows at the top. How do different worlds mix?
Sometimes you just know their search is navigational. That's where you really want a business listing. Hopefully a map will give you some context. We have very interesting algorithms which try to predict what people are looking for. A business? Or not a business? Or just some background research?
Make sure you have your business name and address on your webpage.
Google Webmaster Tools. Can you talk about the importance of a sitemap?
Yes. It tells Google, "These are the pages important to me." When you're new, you might not have a lot of links. But you can tell Google now that you have 20 pages.
You can see where a bad guy would create 1,000 domains and submit a sitemap for each domain. It can't hurt, it can only help.
Google Base. We work a lot with real estate agent. In the states, it does show in the search results, but not in Canada.
Google always looks at what's good for the users. He hopes that more and more people would use Google Base. That's where you can submit data, and it will show up.
New to the video world. Had a good time. Should we post video on YouTube, Google Video? How do we make sure it gets found?
If it's less than 10 minutes, put it on YouTube. If it's longer, you can do longer form video on Google Video. It makes a big difference if you can get a transcript. Ship it to India and pay 2 cents per word, or whatever.
Search engines still have a problem indexing spoken stuff. Do good meta tags, and put some keywords in the description.
One last question about indexing. In your navigation, have CSS, bulleted lists, as opposed to Flash or JavaScript. In general, take Netscape 4, or Lynx, and see how your website looks. That's what it looks like to a bot. If you have Flash or JavaScript, it can be hard to interpret that.
Google does a very good job. But you have to think about every search engine. In the future, other search engines may be more popular. Make it simpler to make it easier to crawl.