What Makes a Great SEO

The guest post on SEOBook today by Hugo Guzman is really worth a read. Using his own personal SEO journey as a model, he lays out what he thinks really separates SEOs from great SEOs.

This pretty much sums it up:

So what did I mean when I said that the great SEOs don’t need a day
job? It’s simple. Great SEO requires an entrepreneurial spirit and an
understanding of the underlying business and marketing considerations
that will help a particular company be successful. Failing to
understand this, whether you’re a garage marketer, in-house optimizer,
or agency SEO, will ensure your continued failure to ascend from good to great.

SEMPO Search Marketing 2007 Salary Survey

I forgot to post this last week and fortunately ran across it again today. SEMPO did a survey of in-house search marketers for salaries and responsibilities.

Some worthy points:

• Only 25% of the respondents said they managed both PPC and SEO
• About 10% of those with less than 3 yrs. experience said they earned over $100,000 per year
• About 35% of those with 5-7 years experience said they earned more than $100,000 per year

I think that experience time gage is a bit vaguer in search marketing being that the path for virtually all those in search was probably meandering and no-one 'started out' in search 5 years ago.

Italian Main Web Portal Data

December 2007 Traffic data for main Italian web portals. Interesting to note that the largest portal, Libero.it, with a 130,000,00 Google.it as the default search engine.

No, You Are Stupid

Ha, had to use that title, especially since it was so fitting.

The CIA released their site search data. And topping the list...'ufo'. hey, at least 'area 51' came in at #20.

November, 2007:

ufo: 2115

korea: 1517

iraq: 1507

December, 2007:

ufo: 1831

korea: 1705

brazil: 1606

Of course the CIA are no dummies, 'Intelligence', so they wisely capitalized on this topical interest by creating a Nav item and special section called 'UFOs: Fact or Fiction'

You can also learn more in this long piece 'CIA's Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947-90', yes authored by the CIA. Notable quotes:

An extraordinary 95 percent of all Americans have at least heard or
read something about Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs), and 57 percent
believe they are real.

the Air Force soon concluded that UFOs were real but easily explained
and not extraordinary. The Air Force report found that almost all
sightings stemmed from one or more of three causes: mass hysteria and
hallucination, hoax, or misinterpretation of known objects.

UFOlogists had long argued that, following a flying saucer crash in New
Mexico in 1947, the government not only recovered debris from the
crashed saucer but also four or five alien bodies.

Yes, thats a word:
u·fol·o·gy (yōō-fŏl'ə-jē)

n.
The study of unidentified flying objects.

[UFO + -logy.]

u'fo·log'i·cal (yōō'fə-lŏj'ĭ-kəl) adj., u·fol'o·gist n.

Best SEO Pluggins for Wordpress Awards

Voted the best and winner by Search Engine Blog readers for 2007 was the All In One SEO Pack. Looks like a great product. Automatically optimizes Titles, auto generates Meta tags, and allows fine tuning and overrides.

The remainder of the nominees and results are list here at Search Engine Journal.

Also, heres the link to the complete 2007 Search Blog Awards. There are a variety of categories and worth a look.

Italian Internet User Data

Here is a good overview of the Italian online user market as of November 2007.

Interesting fact that Italy is far behind the UK, France, and Germany for usage of the internet related to e commerce, 44% vs. 60-67%.

World's Biggest Domain Taster

This is pretty awesome. While
domain tasting, or kiting, is pretty common, especially for bigger domainers, what is
astounding is that they are claiming that this company alone is responsible for
72% of all tasting in the world.

To give an idea, some estimates put the number of tasted domains
returned each day to be about 1% of all active domains that exist in the world,
which is probably around 150-200 million owned domain names.

Needless to say, domain tasting is likely the majority of all domain
purchases.

SEO Moz Domain Tasting