We invite the reader to be both careful and critical. If we don't say "among our respondents" when making conclusions below, then we should have, and we hope the reader will forgive the absence of this important phrase. We here at SEOmoz are hoping that you can use what we've got below as a starting point, take this data, and ask some of your own questions. It seems that there are several very high quality YOUmoz posts to be written here. The level of competition is another important factor. For example, if the product or service you are selling is a common one, you’ll have to compete with a larger group. Thus, you’ll need extensive search engine optimization. But if your product is less common, the level of competition you face is less. And with minimal SEO techniques, you can achieve great success. Keyword popularity is another SEO technique. The more popular the keyword is, the more SEO techniques you'll need to use. If the keyword for your website is less popular, there are fewer websites competing with you. Hence, with very little optimization, you can rank high. In general, we can see that most respondents are self-taught, followed by on-site training and formal classes. However, this graph breaks down responses by the type of company a respondant works for, and helps to answer questions like "If a respondent works at an SEM agency, how likely is it that he or she learned SEO and how does that compare to respondents at other types of companies?" The chart indicates that respondents from SEM agencies, and non-self-employed respondents in general, received on-site traning more often than, for instance, self employed consultants. This is probably not surprising, but knowing this kind of difference in source of SEO education might indicate broader differences between self-employed and non-self-employed SEOs. We'll look at differences between these groups in more detail below, and this might be a great starting place for further analysis of the data by the reader. There are a number of other factors that can determine the search engine requirements of your website. One such factor is the utility of the website. What is the goal of your website? Are you selling a single product or a number of products through your website? Well, if your website is a single product website, the probability that visitors will buy the product is less. Therefore, more SEO techniques are needed. On the other hand, if your website is a multiple product website, you will require fewer SEO techniques. Studying income and trends in income might also be of interest. From this graph we can see the distribution of income of the respondant, broken down by the type of company the respondant works for, just as we broke down education above. This chart can help to answer questions like "What's the average income for respondents working at publicly traded companies vs self-employed non-consultants?" Ignoring respondents who declined to answer, we can see that the distribution of income of respondents working at publicly traded non-agencies has a higher average than that of self-employed non-consultants, or respondents working for private non-agencies. The difference in modes (as graphed here) could be in the neighborhood of $40,000. That seems like a fairly significant difference in income, and further supports the differences in populations we saw in education above. Link Building Can Be Two-Way or One-Way Two-way link building, or reciprocal link building, is a sort of link exchange. Two site owners mutually agree to place each others' links on their websites with an assurance that the links will drive traffic to their site. One-way link building is placing your link on some other sites and offering them something in return. A simple way of building links is to submit useful articles with your link to different article directories or writing blogs. This is the best way to drive traffic to your site. This chart, similar to the previous one, can help us to answer questions about the income of respondents who serve different job types, rather than breaking down by company type. This difference might be a little confusing, so for example, one of SEOmoz's developers might have responded to the survey as working for either an SEM agency (or privately held non-agency, depending on when and who you ask), but since they don't actually do any of the company's consulting, perhaps "In-House" is the best description for them. On the other hand, Rebecca, one of SEOmoz's SEO consultants, does a lot of both, so this chart can help to look at differences in income between these kinds of people. Optimizing a Web Site's SEO Ranking - Off-Page SEO Off-Page Search Engine Optimization Off-Page search engine optimization deals with the establishment of incoming links to the website. This is often known as link building. Search engines give great consideration to incoming links and their popularity. Now I’m going to hit on the items that I didn’t have room to cover last time. Just to review quickly from last time, I didn’t come up with this list. The credit goes to Gary Beal, aka SEO Chat poster and moderator GaryTheScubaGuy. Gary has been an SEO for ten years, specializing in search, pay per click, affiliate management and email marketing. He focuses on competitive industries such as online gaming, banking and finance, insurance, travel and investments, so he knows what he’s talking about. He is currently affiliated with Stickyeyes. It is always wise to link to a site relevant to your own. Good quality linking, which means a link that has a high ranking, can definitely drive good traffic to the site linked to it, thereby increasing the page ranking of the site. To the contrary, if the site linked to your site is of poor quality, your site is at a high risk of being affected. A careful study of what sites you are linking to is essential. Check that all pages of the website are properly linked and have proper content. This helps the spider crawl through each page. This chart indicates less difference in income distributions between job types than the previous chart broken down by company type. But we can see that the distribution of of income for in-house marketers may be multi-modal. While this data might be inconclusive, in other settings a multi-modal distribution like this might indicate that the population actually consists of two more homogenous sub-populations. If this were the case, in this situation, it might indicate that in-house marketers fall into two groups, one of which is paid more on average than the other. Taking a look at if there really are two sub-populations among in-house marketers and, if so, how else these two populations can be described, might yield interesting trends in the industry as a whole. Make your website look pleasant and appealing to the visitors. Add suitable designs and light graphics to make it beautiful. This entices people to give your site a second visit. It’s a natural human tendency to give a second look to things that please the eyes. We'll continue to look at differences between in-house and consulting marketers in the graphs that follow, and we encourage the reader to pick up on any trends we might uncover. Meta tags can also be used to boost the search engine rankings, but not to a great extent. Moreover, meta tags are now rarely used to check the relevancy of a website. Adding them, however, will do no harm to your website. This chart shows which keyword research tools are used by marketers at different kinds of companies. Differences in the popularity of specific tools, for instance the relative higher popularity of Keyword Discovery among SEM agencies than among other types of companies, might provide some insight into strategies, objectives, or simply the user-base of the different tools. Coupling this knowledge with other observations about differences among company types might be interesting. For instance, we see that respondents from SEM agencies are much more likely to use keyword research tools and are, at the same time, much more likely to receive on the job training; this kind of correlation would be expected. Using duplicate content reduces the chances of your website being crawled. So avoid using duplicate content. Also check that the content of your website is grammatically correct. Remember, there is a lot of difference in spelling between American and British English. Use the grammar of your target market. Always keep your text in HTML format rather than using graphics to convey text. This is because the search engines do not give much attention to graphics. Similarly to the previous chart, this one shows popularity of keyword research tools broken out by job type. Something which strikes me as being potentially interesting is the relative higher percentage of respondents indicating no use of keyword research tools among in-house search marketers. In fact, the most popular tool among in-house marketers, Wordtracker, is only twice as likely to be used as no tool at all. Compare this to consultant marketer respondents who are about four times as likely to use Wordtracker than no tool at all, and nearly twice as likely to use their next most popular tool, Keyword Discovery. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you can just jumble the keywords wherever possible. Make the content fluent with proper keyword usage. Unnecessary and excess usage of keywords can make a search engine devalue your site or completely ban it from its index. Keep updating the content of your website so that every time a particular visitor visits your site, he or she can find the updated content. This makes the visitor keep visiting. This graph shows the percentage of respondents who register sites with each of the major search engine backed registration sites (Google Webmaster Central, Yahoo Site Explorer, and Microsoft Webmaster Portal). Even without breaking this data out by company type, we can see, not surprisingly, that Google has a much larger share of registrants (among our respondents) than Yahoo or Live. But it's also interesting to see that, among our respondents, self-employed consultants register at nearly the same average rate as the rest of our respondents with Google, but they register at a lower than average rate with Yahoo! Site Explorer or Live. Recalling the education sources of self-employed non-consultants (discussed above), this might be because self-employed non-consultants don't know about the value in registering with engines other than Google. Or it might be that these non-consultant respondents simply don't see value in registering outside of Google. Website content is the major thing you must concentrate on in order to get a good search engine ranking. Keep the relevant content that best portrays your website and its purpose. Search engines have automated crawler programs called spiders or bots (or sometimes even spiderbots), which crawl through the content of the website and search for keywords entered by the user. So make the content of your website keyword rich. Nearly 50% of respondents (of any type) recommend the use of the nofollow attribute for links, while nearly 40% do not recommend the use of nofollow. However, the number of respondents who are unsure of the use of nofollow is higher among in-house marketers than among the rest of our respondents. This "not sure" sentiment (across all job types) indicates that the issues around no-follow are still "up-in-the-air" for more than 10% of our respondents, but especially among in-house marketers, which, as discussed below, make up the largest group of our respondents. Any correlations with other factors aren't discussed here, so we encourage the reader to take a look at the data for herself. The title of your website often makes the first impression. The website title appears on the colored bar at the top of the web page. Make the title attractive and impressive. Choose a good keyword that best describes your website. Similarly, give good keyword rich titles for the sub-pages linked within your website. We also saw some interesting responses to some of the questions, even without breaking out the data, so we've included a few of those below. What is your pre-tax personal yearly earnings, including salary, bonuses, benefits, & income from side projects?
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