SEO/SEM News

What happened to MSN/Windows Live? Their link: command is not working. So several tool makers could be affected. Although I found out doing it manually. Could it be MSN is redoing their link: command to run more effectively? I noticed the site: command still works fine. Link and Linkdomain are not working.

As I have mentioned before, I took the test by the ISO 9001-2000 company, ExpertRating being a Certified in Search Engine Optimization under their test which I really did not do 100% well but still passed the course without any review, I still do not believe in SEO/SEM Certification. And I did mention that the only reason I would want to go through all these SEO certification or SEM Certification is basically this is what people trust. Co-workers who are not SEO people, clients, subordinates and superiors in the corporate setup. And right now, I have just finished another certification program. WebCEO’s Professional Search Engine Marketing Certification where I went through all the courseware and assessment test.

I decided to go with WebCEO’s certification program next after the ExpertTraining test since I am a paid user of WebCEO. (check my review of WebCEO) And if you are a paid user, along comes with it is the certification program for free. At first I expected this program to be useless and it will be more about selling you on the product even more, to get you more hooked up with it and use it forever. Well one thing I can say that does still exist, but their certification program is still overall good for overall SEO knowledge even is you use WebCEO or not. And I was personally impressed with the following:

• Comprehensiveness of the course
• Does not only teach how to do SEO and SEM effectively, but also give tips on how to run your SEO operations and even run your own SEO business.
• Has some insights on how to sell your SEO services, how to promote and market.
• Will give insights into problem areas as the last lessons and how to possible tackle problem websites with frames, Flash and other websites that make have indexing problems with the search engines.

I personally know almost everything said in the course, but I like it since I know many beginners may like the course. Use this course and read Aaron Wall’s SEOBook, and this is the perfect beginner course. I believe if I would have some employees starting out in SEO and need some training. I think this is a good teacher, SEOBook plus WebCEO certification.

The WebCEO courseware was composed of 6 course stages. And each stage differs in number of steps with different numbers of lessons per step. As I feel a bit strained staring at monitors reading long bodies of text, I print out each lesson that is usually 2 to 5 pages and the whole course was a total of 71 lessons. It had online assessment exams after every step and after every stage. It took quite some time to finish 71 lessons, but since I print them out, I bring them along with me where ever I go and read them during any idle time. Most of the time in the rest room! :p The course was good generally.

Right now, I am trying out the Search Engine Workshops Certification program and right now I find it kind of slow and dragging and a bit conservative in its ways, but still valuable for the less knowledgeable in SEO.

If you have used the Google Keyword Tool mainly made for Adwords users to guide them in buying sponsored links in the search results, you should have noticed the green bars that show you a range of how high a keyword or keyphrase is searched and how many people are bidding for it.

And just a 2 days ago, on the blog adamap, they have caught the Google Keyword Tool showing some actual figures. Numbers right beside the green bar but quickly disappeared. That would have been a very useful tool, but it seems it is still in the planning stage as it quickly went away.

Hopefully it stays there in the future. Even more useful, I hope they even add some estimated bid prices placed right beside it as well all in one view.