Web Pro News interviewed many top search gurus. Gareth published a number of seo beginner videos here. Matt Cutts is Google’s head of search quality. Keep in mind Google’s bias and perspective when watching Matt’s videos as below:

• Google Sitemaps Questions, DMOZ Snippet Usage & Qualities of a Good Site
  • make your site crawlable & have a citation worthy marketing hook
  • DMOZ snippet usage is query dependant, but you can use the meta NoODP tag to prevent them from using that as your description
• Some SEO Myths
  • most people do not need to worry about footprints (IP address, hostname, Javascript trackers) unless they are bulk spammers
  • when launching a site you may want to soft launch (ie: do not publish hundreds of thousands or millions of pages right out of the gate)
• Should You Optimize for Search Engines or Users & Code Validation
  • Both are important, but they are not mutually exclusive. SEO brings visitors. User optimization ensures conversion.
  • Validation is not necessary. Compelling content is more important than validation. But having valid code may be another reason some other webmasters may be willing to link at your site.
• Geotargeting SEO, Static vs Dynamic URLs
  • PageRank flows the same to static and dynamic URLs. You probably want to use shorter numbers and limit the number of URL parameters to 2-3 max. Mod Rewrite is your friend
  • If you are geotargeting by country treat GoogleBot as a US user, do not make a country just for Google.
• 301 Redirecting a Domain, Information Architecture, Split Testing
  • Most redirects from related sites are fine. If the topics are different then you can run into problems.
  • Organize your site folders based on information architecture more than on keywords.
  • It is best to A/B split test pages which are not cached for Google.
• Supplemental Results
  • Result estimates are highly inaccurate.
  • Supplemental results are trusted less than regular results and are crawled less frequently.
• Duplicate Content
  • There are many stages of duplicate content analysis, from crawl, indexing, to scoring. There is no exact limit to duplication detection.
• Google Terminology
  • Major noticeable index updates are rare since the search index is constantly updated. In the past on old architecture monthly updates were called Google Dances.
  • PageRank is constantly updated. Data refreshes are quite frequent. Large algorithmic updates are quite rare.
• Google Data Centers
  • On one C block IP address most of the results will typically be the same unless one of the data centers is down and you are being switched over due to load balancing.
  • Many new algorithms or data refreshes are rolled out on one data center at a time for testing purposes.
• Lightning Round
  • just random…not lots of stuff
• Reinclusion Requests
  • Sign up at Google Webmaster Central for Google Sitemaps and file for a reinclusion request giving specific information. Also try to convince Google that the quality guideline violations will not occur again.
• SES Tips
• Google Webmaster Tools
• Data Center Comments
  • A fraction of the web is updated every day.
  • Data pushes seem to come out roughly once a month.
  • BigDaddy was a refresh to how they crawl the web and a partially and update to how they index it (as Matt said before here).
• Crawling Patterns
  • Matt Cutts talks about how Googlebot crawls the web and updates page cache dates.
• [AUDIO] Mike Grehan interviews Matt Cutts. Part 1 and part 2.
  • Matt Cutts confirms the Google Sandbox effect as being an accidental side effect which occurred as an artifact of another part of the relevancy scoring algorithm.
• [AUDIO] Matt Cutts with Emarketing Talk Show
• [AUDIO] Vanessa Fox interviews Matt Cutts
  • talks about how results change from searcher to searcher and a couple advanced searching things (like personalized search, and accents vs non-accents)
  • talks about Google webmaster central
  • talks about hacking and link dumping, and catching cloaking by doing an English to English translation of a page

Google AdWords videos

• how to create an AdWords account – very basic
• how AdSense ads work – very basic
• Google AdWords learning center – free videos and quizzes about learning how various aspects of the Google AdWords system work.
• Keep in mind Google’s bias and perspective when watching their videos. They want to make money and they sell the ads. Their advice on things like budget optimizer (which I would never recommend using) might be a bit self serving.

Dan Thies Videos

• Dan on links (exe Zip file)
• Dan on links, part 2 (web based)
• Dan on keyword research – links to a page about controlling entry page. On that page he offers both Windows and Mac friendly downloads of his keyword research video.
• Dan on PPC keyword list generation

Brad Fallon & Andy Jenkins

• Going Natural Desktop Training Center – conversion tips and SEO related marketing tips in ~ 20-25 minute videos.
  • The first one talks about the power of search in general, and the importance of the concept of the long tail as it relates to search engine marketing.
  • The second one talks a bit about latent semantic indexing and natural link building tips.
  • The third one talks about safety and certification related lemming factors (like using an Alexa.com certified button to be associated with a well trusted brand like Amazon.com). It also mentions that you can rank 1 page websites, but fails to mention that it generally is much harder to build authority if you are starting from 1 page unless you are quite savvy with your other marketing techniques.

Shoemoney on Directories

• Shoemoney interviews DaveN and Oilman about directories