Earlier this year we asked the community to take our SEO Industry Survey. We had originally hoped to get at least 3,000 responses and were completely blown away when over 10,000 people ended up taking the survey! Of course, it never hurts to have an iPad as the grand prize, but I'm still very excited about the extent of this report. As a comparison, another excellent survey in our industry earlier this year from eConsultancy and SEMPO generated ~1,500 responses (results are detailed in this SELand article).

Our survey's goal was to gather information about SEO in 2010 and share it publicly. We asked questions around:

• Who are the people in the SEO community?
• How do they learn about SEO and sharpen their skills?
• How are companies embracing search marketing?
• Which tools and tactics do people in the industry use to support their SEO and social media efforts?

After some detailed number crunching by our good friend Will Critchlow from Distilled, we're happy to present to you the results from the data.

Get the 2010 Industry Results Here

Some of the cool things you'll see include:

• What percent of SEOs say they buy links, report spam and how many overlap?
• Salary ranges across countries, experience levels and job descriptions
• Demographics of SEO - we might need to work on our male/female ratio
• and lots more - just go read it!

We've also created a spiffy infographic to help visualize the survey results:

For those who'd like to delve into the data more deeply, and extract new views on the information from the 10K+ respones, we've made the full data dump available in CSV form: download here. We'd love to see any interesting/unique analyses on this information, and we hope it's useful to those organizations and companies seeking to learn more about the SEO market.

Winners!

We can't forget to mention the people who won gifts for participating in the survey. The winners were notified back in June and they've all received their prizes. Here are the winners:

Grand Prize: 32GB Wi-Fi iPad:
Sam Ilowitz

First Prize: 120min Flip Mino HD Camera with custom SEOmoz artwork:
Jared Reed
Jay Estis
J. Smeekens

Second Prize: $35 gift certificates to the SEOmoz Zazzle Store:
Gareth Allen
Jody Lonergan
Anton Korzhuk
Jason Tan
Robert Palmer
Sebastien Mégraud
Lindsay Copeland
Joakim Eriksson
Nicholas Foo
Brian Hutchison

It's been a tremendous pleasure and honor to be part of such a powerful and growing industry, and this survey highlights the depth, breadth and uniqueness of those who do SEO professionally. Thanks so much for participating - we hope to make this a biennial (or possibly even annual) tradition.

p.s. We've also got the questions in individual results format on this detail page. Feel free to use any of the images and data in your reports, presentations, analyses, slide decks, etc. but if you use them online, we'd appreciate a link (nofollow is fine, but remember it leaks PageRank) ;-)