SEM/SEO

As reported by several SEO programmers on SEO Philippines, The MSN/Live API has been displaying results not similar to the actual results online. In fact they do not even look similar and are totally different.

Is this a sneak peek of what’s to come on MSN’s ranking results? Or is the API delayed and the actual results are the final results? Some people have decided to either read the MSN/Live RSS feeds or scrape the search results.

I wonder when will MSN/Live make things right?

This was an interesting topic brought about by Marc Macalua in the SEO Philippines mailing list, where he pointed out an article by Andy Beal David Temple on Marketing Pilgrim on Certifications for SEO/SEM. And I have also shared my experiences in talking about SEO/SEM education. As some of the members in the email group has shared, education may be important but in the SEO business, there are just too many trade secrets that some people are not willing to divulge. Thus how can this certification take place and who certifies the certifier? Which was a good point raised by Jonathan Casuncad of SEM-Pros.com. And he did also mention that certifications may be done for PPC campaigns since this is pretty straight forward with no hidden tactics but simply plain strategy that can be certified by the Search Engine companies themselves. One of the popular certification bodies, SEMPO does not certify you for passing a certain level of skill or knowledge, but simply certifies you that you have undergone the training. Although mentioned by Andy Beal David Temple, for him the only certification out there is Bruce Clay’s SEOToolSetâ„¢ since it is his tools, thus he can certify people in the proficiency of using his tool. And if this is the case, then WebCEO is also a valid certification for using their software as well. But one thing’s for sure, this certification may not necessarily mean someone has more knowledge or skills in Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing, and someone without any official training does not also mean they are inferior, but I agree that certification of whatever kind can sometimes be good enough proof to a prospective client, or prospective job in order to get the deal.

In the SEO Philippines group mailing list, there are people that have some good amount of SEO experience but there are still some newbies as well in the list. And for some people, it may still be unknown how to submit to search engines.

If you don’t submit, but you have websites linked to you. You will still somehow get crawled when the bots (also called robots, spiders, crawlers) go over your site. These bots are nothing but programs of the search engines that go from one site to another tracing every link. Unless there is a nofollow attribute, (but i really don’t think so, I believe it is still crawled, but not given the ranking credit for having a link. This is my personal opinion only.)

But if time is a factor and you want to be crawled earlier, you can submit your sites to Google, Yahoo and MSN.

• Google Add URL
• Yahoo Submit Your Site
• MSN Submit to Live Search

For advanced stuff, you might want to look into Google Sitemaps and Yahoo Feed Submissions via SiteExplorer beta.

I am encouraging all newbies to join the Ituloy Angsulong SEO contest. Don’t be discouraged by other more experienced members. Ituloy Angsulong is not only a contest of knowledge. Ituloy Angsulong is also a contest of who has more time and effort to invest in the contest. Ituloy Angsulong is also a contest of creativity. And for the *ehem* some of the blackhat people, it can be a contest of technical programming knowledge. If you may not know the knowledge in some basic skills. You can learn them along the way in the Ituloy Angsulong SEO contest. And use your other talents to make your site rank higher. In this SEO contest, win or lose just try everything you can learn and observe how it goes. This alone can teach your SEO already.