For those thinking about joining SEMPO, they are giving those that do access to tools and services worth $2000. SEMPO yearly memberships are as low as $125 but you get some of the best tools of the trade as a bonus.

SEMPO announced today its “Tools of the Trade” Toolkit, an exclusive collection of no-obligation trials and credits from 10 companies designed to boost the efforts of search and digital marketing professionals. Members who join or renew their membership by December 31, 2011, will receive the Toolkit as a benefit of their SEMPO membership.

“The participating companies really stepped up to make this an incredible benefit available for new and existing members,” noted Rob Garner, SEMPO vice president, North American Groups, and vice president of strategy at iCrossing. “The SEMPO Toolkit provides members with hands-on access to a wide variety of useful tools and services at no extra fee or obligation.”

Companies offering unique discounts or products in the Toolkit include:

Bing
Bruce Clay, Inc.
Cannedbanners
Exclusive Concepts
iCrossing
MajesticSEO
Raven
SEOmoz PRO
SpyFu
Wordbank

SEMPO yearly memberships are as low as $125. For complete details on Toolkit items or to join SEMPO, please visit http://sempo.site-ym.com/?page=join.

About Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO)

SEMPO is a global non-profit organization serving the search marketing industry and marketing professionals engaged in it. Its purpose is to provide a foundation for industry growth through building stronger relationships, fostering awareness, providing education, promoting the industry, generating research and creating a better understanding of search and its role in marketing. SEMPO includes thousands of professionals across 50 countries. The organization’s mission is to represent the common interests of companies and consultants worldwide and provide them with a voice in the marketplace. SEMPO’s education and outreach initiatives are funded in part by Google, American Express Open SearchManager, and Baidu, and supported through partnerships with SMX, SES, OMS, MediaPost and GroupM Search. For more information or to join the organization, visit http://www.SEMPO.org.

It seems that Bing favors Microsoft products, the Icelandic company DataMarket has been using that name since 2007 and has had it registered since that year. Recently Microsoft announced new services that has the same name. When you search for Datamarket on Google they came number one on both Google and Bing, now it is still number one on Google (The Microsoft DataMarket nowhere to be found) but second on Bing, with the Microsoft services number one.

The Internet Marketing Conference in Iceland RIMC 2010 was a huge success (sold out) with speakers from Econsultancy, Ericsson, Bing, Anomaly, Nordic eMarketing, Hunterlodge, CCP Games, Icelandair and more. The conference was on the 12th of March and lasted the whole day. You can read more about the conference at the PR Week blog.

Read the PR Week posts on the 2010 Reykjavik Internet Marketing Conference here:

RIMC 2010: Fake plastic trees
RIMC 2010: Earned media vs bought media
RIMC 2010: e-commerce and vintage bath tubs
RIMC 2010: I am here

PR Weeks Matt Cartmell blogged from the Reykjavik Internet Marketing Conference, where speakers will be discussing the hot issues of the web – be it online PR, social media or mobile marketing.

After all the rumours, Microsoft and Yahoo finally agreed to merge their search services to compete with the grand search engine, Google.

Microsoft’s new search engine – Bing will power the Yahoo search engine, while Yahoo Search Marketing will be powered by Microsoft AdCenter. Yahoo rankings are going to change once it is replaced by Bing, so if Microsoft’s search offerings have not been of any concern to you before, now is the time to become familiar with it’s rules and ways to optimize your website for Bing. Bing is an open search engine to webmaster’s optimization efforts and you can get your website, even the brand new one, to be listed at the top of Bing much faster than on Google. Once your website is well ranked on Bing’s listings you can move on to optimization for Google.

 Five simple steps to get noticed on Bing: 

 1. Choose the oldest domain – the older the domain, the more chances there are of getting your site a high ranking.

2. Pick the best keywords in the title tags of every page on your website – Bing places a lot more emphasis on title tags than Google does.

3. Come up with excellent text – for Bing the amount of text on pages holds more value than it does for Google, so aim for at least 300 words.

4. Outbound links are OK – Google is cautious of the number of outbound links you have on a page whereas Bing seems to like them.

5.  Get as many backlines from relevant sites as possible – Bing’s attitude here is “the more, the merrier” but make sure the links are coming from relevant sites.

It takes time to get good rankings with Bing, so the sooner you align your website with Microsoft’s search policies, the better chance you will have to ride the wave of change to the top of Bing’s–and Yahoo’s–search results