A Collection of Great SEM Articles

Andy Beal has posted the five finalists in the Marketing Pilgrim SEM Scholarship finals. If you haven't already read them, it's certainly worth your time. I'm on the panel of judges and Andy will be announcing the winner before too long, but there's still time to get in and read through the wide range of thoughts and ideas presented by the content entrants.

Paul Steinbrueck offers up "AIDS Clickathon – A Viral Marketing Strategy to Fight the HIV/AIDS Virus in Africa." In this article, Paul offers up details on a viral marketing campaign that he put in place to help two friends that are launching an orphanage in Africa to help care for children whose parents have died of AIDS. The article features quite a bit of information about how they launched and managed the AIDS Clickathon.

CK Chung pens "Have Your Top Competitors Do Some of Your SEO For You." Chung takes a look at the impact of competitive intelligence on the time and effort it takes to optimize your own site, including link analysis, source code analysis and keyword analysis.

Daniel Tynski writes "The 7 Deadly Sins that Hurt You as an SEO or SEM." This article offers up seven different areas that many search marketers (well, marketers period) struggle with and throws out a wide range of tools designed to help address those issues.

Marios Alexandrou contributes "Big SEO Projects – A Strategy To Get Them." Marios explains the difficulty that some search shops have in communicating with upper level management at large corporations. He points out that it's not simply a semantics issue, but rather a question of understanding the goals of a business rather than the goals of a marketer.

Finally, Jeff Horsager explains how to "Increase Conversion Rates with the Google Website Optimizer." In this article, Jeff explores the idea of A/B split testing and multivariate testing and explains how to use Google Website Optimizer to test and track results.

In all, it's five great articles worth reading and digesting to help you better learn to market your business online.