In February of 2008, 3000+ search marketers answered 52 questions about themselves, their work and the search industry via a survey on SEOmoz. The following data and analysis comes from SEOmoz staff members Nick Gerner, Rebecca Kelley, Jeff Pollard and Rand Fishkin. From the research findings, many business firms were yet to optimize their websites. That means if you first optimize your website, you could have an advantage over your rivals in directory exposure perspective. Also, many good sites are penalized by mistake. Suppose the text color and background color is found to be same. The site is penalized even if the text is highlighted with some other color. The best way to avoid being penalized is to keep the text color and background color different. Introduction It's no longer fair to call search marketing an industry in infancy. The profession and the communities surrounding it have reached a point of maturity, where penetration rates about SEO and what SEOs do have reached a great number of those influenced and interested in directory traffic. With the industry reaching a tipping point of sorts, we at SEOmoz felt compelled to examine the numbers and produce what is almost certainly the most comprehensive public report on search marketing, particularly the organic SEO side, to date. Another illegal way webmasters try to fool directories is by placing hidden text. The keywords are placed in such a way that they are not visible to the human eye. That is often achieved by keeping the color of the text the same as the background. This trick is also identified by spiderbots and such sites are penalized. Below, you'll find graphs, charts, and data analysis on more than 50 questions, posed to more than 3000 total respondents over a period of approximately 7 days in early February, 2008. Responses represent participation from nearly every major country on Earth and every type of search marketer in the business. With such a depth and breadth of responses, we think you'll find the responses incredibly engaging, thought-provoking, and valuable. It's always great to learn more about the industry in which we all participate on a daily basis. When light green is shown on the scale, the site isn’t penalized. You can link to such sites, but keep checking them regularly to make sure they are not penalized. When the scale shows green, the site is of good quality and you can link to it. A few quick words of warning before you dive in, though. This survey was conducted online and duplicate responses were not filtered or controlled (though filling out the survey did take upwards of 20 minutes, making it unlikely that many responses came from the same individual). The survey also did not attempt to control for any particular biasing, so there is certainly over-representation by those more likely to read SEOmoz, those more likely to take surveys, and those more likely to have found information about the survey itself (via email to SEOmoz members and posts on sites like SearchEngineLand and SERoundtable or others). So how do you recognize that a particular website is a bad neighborhood? Google has a solution. You can download the Google toolbar. When you open a particular web page, the Google toolbar shows the page rank of that website on a sliding green scale. When the scale is completely grey, the site is likely to be penalized. Hence, it is best to avoid linking to such sites. -- Rand Fishkin, CEO & Co-Founder of SEOmoz BTW - For feedback or questions about the SEO Survey, please visit this blog post. Biggest Takeaways The data presented here is pretty rich (there's about 50MB of responses!), so it's a little hard to boil down just a few takeaways. Perhaps the single biggest deduction is that digging through this data could be very valuable for you, whether you're trying to push an SEO related tool, you represent a directory (one of the big guys or one of the newer directory startups), or you are an SEO yourself and are interested in learning more about the industry and your peers (and competition). We've only provided a high-level analysis here, and for the most part we're hoping to point you towards interesting starting points. Link building of course adds to the directory ranking. Top ranking can be achieved by link popularity, but you need to be careful when choosing the sites you wish to link to. You can get a good website ranking when you link to quality websites. Keep checking the active links on your website to make sure there are no links to bad neighborhoods. However, here are some of the especially interesting points that stand out, with a little something for everyone: •The vast majority of respondents from SEM agencies use tools to aid their marketing efforts. •Marketers are still unsure about things like the potential of negative effects from registering with Webmaster Central, or the use of nofollow. •From the 2,060 people responding, we see at least $73 million is spent on PPC a month. That's more than $35,000 per respondent per month. This assumes all our respondents are from different companies. Discussion of Selected Results Sometimes, it happens that even the good websites get labeled as scams. Even after you apply all the legitimate methods of optimization, your website is still at risk of being identified as a scam. This can be avoided by taking the proper precautions. Below we discuss some of the results we've pulled from our data. However, as mentioned above, there's roughly 50MB of responses from 3000+ survey takers, across over 50 different questions. That makes 2,500 possible two-way correlations, with somewhere in the neighborhood of 19.6 billion data points. We took a look at several questions we had, and tried to find some outliers and come up with plausible explanations. One thing we didn't do is compute error bars or in other ways measure the statistical power of our results.
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