Have you ever thought about how big an industry is? How many people actually work as SEOs or who are the people looking up SEO information. One would assume that for X amount of SEOs only Y amount of them are actually vocal.

So Danny Sullivan polled his search engine land visitors recently asking them about their work and experience.

65% worked in SEO for more than 3 years, of which 40% said more than 5 years.

Only 30% of them work at a SEO firm, of which 25% work for a company as a search marketer.

According to Danny, they aren't done 'crunching the numbers' from the survey and he will release more information in the near future. I wonder how many people took place in the survey?!

25% of the 30% work for a company as a search marketer? Guess that's me, but I just got "downsized". I'm probably not alone out there either, I did SEO for this company for 2 years...and they never really "got it" as far as the importance of conversion or organic traffic.

It's fine, because they're really spread too thinly to utilise a concrete SEO/SEM strategy, they only have one web designer, and it would take him weeks to implement the changes I would want to implement.

I think most SEO's that are in it for the long haul realise that they can work for themselves, or a small SEO company, and get the same benefits as though they were working for a firm. (without going into the office from 9-5).

I read a report recently that says it takes about 10 years to become really proficient at something...I'd agree with that in principle, the people who've been in SEO for that long (and are still active) can write their own tickets.

I wonder, as well as the numbers above, how many people tried doing SEO, and gave up within a year, two years, etc...

Not changing the algorithm? I guess you haven't heard about the recent Big Daddy update. They just made some huge algorithm changes, and will continue to as time progresses.
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/bigdaddy-progress-update/
http://www.google.com/search?q=google+big+daddy+update

SEO: Linking Strategy
For reciprocal links.. Do it yourself and BY HAND. Don’t use one of those 1000+ link directory sites. Keep your links relevant to the PAGES you want to link to. Don’t always use your homepage as the page that the incoming reciprocal link is coming to, and try and mix up your anchor text so it’s not the same damn thing over and over. If you add more keywords and turn your anchor text into more of a one liner description with your primary and secondary keywords inside, you’ll see better results on a broader scale, rather than just hitting one keyword at a time.
For direct links.. outsource it. I always do. Don’t buy those pay per month links either, because those aren’t permanent if you decide you don’t want to shell out $50 a month anymore. Get someone from e lance or RAC or somewhere like that and make them understand that you want RELEVANT and TOPIC RELATED direct links. They’ll probably charge you a one time fee of $10-$20 per link, but it’s a permanent link so it’s probably worth it. Don’t worry about page rank either, because it’s fairly useless. Make sure the pages that are linking to you are ones that are visited often by the engines and are RELEVANT to your PAGES. Follow the same anchor text rules as above..
Be patient and once the link has been established LEAVE IT ALONE. Don’t play around with it. Let the engines take it’s course and keep updating your links every month. Don’t get greedy either. A maximum of 30 links per month is just fine.
This should give you substantial rankings over the next 3-6 months. Follow this method and I can almost assure you it will beat out whatever current method you’re using. If you’re worried about using this on a primary site of yours, then you should have test/dummy sites where you use them for testing out new seo methods without risking your primary sites.
Best Regards,

<<MOD NOTE: Signatures must be set in your profile signature space and not manually added to posts.>>