Optimize your site’s search engine ranking with video
By Mikal Belicove   |   Entrepreneur Magazine - February 2010

Because video has become the new darling of search engines, many startups are rushing to create and post video on their websites. Just run a Google or Bing search on any topic, and links to video clips pop up right on page one. The reason for this is that search engines are tripping over themselves to provide blended search results­–links to news, blog posts, photos, video and other specialized content all mixed together. To ensure video is included in the results, search engines give them preferential treatment.

This trend presents startups that are able to produce quality video content with tremendous search engine optimization (SEO) opportunities. In fact, Forrester Research reports that compared with standard SEO techniques, a properly submitted video is 50 times more likely to achieve a first-page Google ranking. And because video is in such short supply, relative to other web-based content, the competition for search engine attention is less fierce.

Many startups and entrepreneurs are not yet taking full advantage of this opportunity. They are not using web-based video, are disregarding video SEO, or are trying but doing it all wrong.

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It’s essential to understand SEO before you spend thousands hiring consultants you may not even need.
By Erin Weinger   |   Entrepreneur Magazine - February 2010

Search engine optimization–the canny use of keywords and other techniques designed to shoot a website to the top of a search–is the make-or-break factor for many new businesses.

It is also the web’s unfolding, and unregulated, frontier. There are countless SEO strategists, consultants and self-professed experts who will claim they can beam your site up into Google’s top 10 search results–for a price, of course. Consultants commonly charge upward of $200 an hour, and most will pressure you to sign a contract that keeps them on retainer for months–at prices as steep as $12,000 a month. Unscrupulous SEO firms not only make promises they can’t keep, the worst of them also use shady practices that might produce no traffic, deliver the wrong traffic or even get you banned from planet Google.

“The SEO business is 80 percent scam,” says Peter Kent, an internet marketing strategist and author of earch Engine Optimization for Dummies. “It’s very, very difficult to find a good firm.”

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