By Manoj Jasra

Microsoft Corp. and SEMPO Institute, www.sempoinstitute.com, announced today an education alliance in which personnel from 20,000 affiliates of the MSN search engine will have access to SEMPO Institute’s online learning program designed to provide in-depth knowledge of best-practices in search engine marketing.

As part of the new alliance, personnel from the MSN affiliates will be able to take SEMPO Institute’s Fundamentals of Search Marketing class.  SEMPO Institute also offers online classes in Advanced Search Engine Optimization and Advanced Search Advertising.  Fundamentals consists of 14 lessons intended to give the student a high level understanding of the essentials of search engine marketing.

Since SEMPO Institute launched in early 2007, the student feedback has been very positive – 80% say they would recommend the Fundamentals course. “All companies need the fundamentals of search marketing in order to implement an e-marketing strategy,” says SEMPO President Jeffrey Pruitt. 

By Vinny Lingham

ReachLocal announced today that they have received a further round of  funding by Rho Ventures, in conjunction with their original investors. The latest round of funding is $55.2m–which values the company at $305m.

ReachLocal’s target market are Small & Medium enterprises, and they have built a platform that allows smaller companies to easily market themselves.

I’ve just watched the ReachLocal video, and it seems that their real value proposition is that they’ve integrated online and offline touch points (points of contact), and can track and report on this for small & medium businesses, which in most cases do not have high hurdles of integration.

This is particularly valuable, as many companies do not factor in the value of offline conversion, related to search engine marketing–those that do, are able to price their keywords far more competitively.

Given the size of the SME marketplace, ReachLocal’s valuation may not be as astronomical as many would think, albeit very high for a traditional SEM firm.

About Vinny Lingham

Vinny is the CEO of Synthasite, a Web 2.0 publishing platform, that aims to revolutionize web publishing.  Synthasite launches on November 5th into Beta.

By Ryan Douglas

Recently I ran across a new feature called “Questions” within Google Base. It appears that Google Base is trying to actively learn about the products being submitted to Base with the help of its users. Our submitted data feed directed Google to ask me 30 questions about our products. The question displays a portion of highlighted text from a text string within the data feed and asks the merchant a question to help identify possible matches for filters like brand, color and material. Google notes that “a record of your answers will be retained by Google and used to improve the quality for your feed as well as our own products and services.”