Marketing Pilgrim announced the winner of the 3rd SEM Scholarship contest and the winner is Linda Bustos from Get Elastic - The Ecommerce Blog, with her incredibly informative and well written article “8 Stupid Things Webmasters Do To Mess Up Their Analytics” . By the way she received 11 out of 17 votes from the judges.

Back in 2006 I entered the initial contest with my article “Shhhh!….the dirty little secret about sem seo certification“ and even though I didn’t win it was an excellent way to get noticed by the judges. I also considered myself and everyone involved with the contest a winner but of course that’s usual banter from a loser. Here’s more about the real winners.

The winner of that first contest was Ben Wills with his article “The Five Pillars of Social Media Marketing“.If you haven’t read it I encourage you to go check it out. I had a chance to meet him at SES Chicago. Ben’s a really bright young man and I knew he would go on to bigger and better things. He’s recently started his new enterprise ontolo and I encourage you to check it out if you are interested in large scale link prospecting services or a keyword landscape and competition analysis tool.

The winner of the second contest was Jeff Horsager, a copywriter who specializes in online and direct marketing, with the article “Increase Conversion Rates with the Google Website Optimizer“. Interestingly enough there was a tie in the second sem scholarship contest with CK Chung aka KidDisco’s article “Have Your Top Competitors Do Some Of Your SEO For You“ also getting 4 votes. The tie breaker was the fact that Jeff had 3,385 visitors compared to CK’s 1,094.

I think Marketing Pilgrims’ SEM Scholarship is one of the best sem/seo contests available, creating a win-win-win situation for the contestants, Marketing Pilgrim and the readers. Make sure you get in on next year’s contest, as a contestant or at least read the submissions. If you haven’t read them yet then go ahead, you may learn a thing or two.