What are the average SEO Salaries for top SEO’s? OnwardSearch has put together this great infographic to show the top markets and average salary for corporate SEO jobs in the U.S. They’ve included several job titles, including “Link Builder” – “SEO Copywriter” – “SEO Analyst or Specialist” – “Content or Keyword Strategist” – “SEO Manager” (by far the most common title) and finally “SEO Director”. I’ve seen titles all over the map, including “Senior SEO Manager” – “Senior SEO Director” and “Senior Internet Marketing Manager, SEO” as well as a few VP level SEO titles that may include “Organic Traffic” or “Traffic Acquisition” which are significantly above the amounts listed here.
These numbers should serve only as a rough outline based on whether other internet marketing duties are included in a job title – such as PPC (very common) or social media (becoming much more common). The bottom end of the salary scale seems to be $25,000 in smaller markets and $40,000 in New York. The top range seems to be $110,000 in smaller markets and $148,000 in New York. They seem to vary widely (as much as $100,000 from the bottom of the scale to the top. But here are the salary ranges for the top 20 markets – (I’m not including the “Link Builder” title salaries in the ranges listed below because I don’t believe that it belongs as an SEO job title unless it is incorporated under the title “Associate SEO”. Those “Link Builder” salary amounts are included in the infographic though):
It should be very clear to everyone that mobile web sites are a necessity now. Some will argue against spending resources and time on building mobile web sites because they don’t close sales or advertise to the mobile audience. I’ll argue that, even though it’s early, that is precisely the time to get a start in mobile if you want to outpace competitors. That is stated by Dai Pham and Sonja Lee, the Google presenters in the video below. This was offered by the Google Mobile Ads marketing team. Top take-aways are:
Google offers a helpful mobile site called “Howtogomo.com
150 Million Americans have web-capable smart phones
Spikes in mobile traffic are seen during Christmas shopping times
Best Practices include
Site Speed – load fast or you’ll lose them
Simplify Navigation
Be Thumb Friendly (large, easy to read navigation)
Make it work on ALL phones (no flash)
Clickable Phone #’s, simple, short forms
Redirect automatically to mobile version of site when mobile user agent is detected
Watch analytics for mobile traffic behavior and tailor site for those behaviors and users
I’ll add something they didn’t say – Include a mobile site map on your site and make pages crawlable (not javascript).
I attended the webinar below on Wednesday this week and asked via the Q&A form whether mobile sitemaps would get mobile results listed in mobile search results. They answered, but not directly – I’ll assume they didn’t understand the question, since it may be outside their expertise as product marketing managers. They said “There isn’t a separate index for mobile” and ignored another question asking whether they had any mobile sitemap advice.
I’ve insisted on crawlable mobile pages with all my clients and each of the three places I’ve worked in the past five years. Developers are quick to post javascript versions of a site, but don’t realize they won’t get indexed by search engines and can’t be seen by bots – javascript only renders in the mobile browser – but that textual content is not indexed unless it is non-javascript html.
Google recommends a mobile sitemap, but I’ve found it frustratingly difficult to get clear answers about how the mobile sitemap helps indexing and whether content from mobile sitemaps is given preference in mobile searches. Google webmaster tools often shows errors in those site maps and low percentage indexing of mobile sitemaps. (Even when their own guidelines are strictly followed). I know from traffic data on two very large sites that it helps bring traffic – but answers are lacking when it comes to more detailed data on mobile search traffic, mobile indexing percentages and mobile search results. Might that be coming Google?
Interestingly, HowToGoMo.com wouldn’t load on my iPhone or my wife’s Android phone – yes, it’s meant for those who are more likely to be reading it on a desktop machine, but shouldn’t we support mobile on a mobile how-to site? It worked on the iPad. Might be a temporary glitch.
Here’s the presentation video from Google – worth watching if you are considering a mobile version of your web site – and you are, aren’t you?
Matt Cutts makes it official in this video that Google doesn’t consider SEO to be spam. He says there are good SEO’s doing “White Hat” work that is not overly aggressive, but says that it can go too far with Black Hat techniques.
Many SEO’s have preached “Content is King” to their clients for years. I’m one of them. So I loved this infographic release this week. I’m also one who preaches a balanced approach though, meaning – everything is incremental. There are hundreds of factors to consider and dozens that you need to do well. You can’t [...]
I’ve been working as an SEO consultant since 1999, first as a freelance consultant, then in-house at major publishers while consulting on the side for the past 5 years. It’s been fascinating to see SEO evolve over that time and great fun to keep the knowledge current via conferences, blogs and research. This Search Engine [...]
I’ve had the honor of working with several startups on their SEO over the past 10 years – as well as doing enterprise level SEO in-house and have come away with some interesting observations. Large, profitable enterprises are based on org-chart decision-making. Because of this, corporate in-house SEO’s inevitably grumble at the layers of bureaucracy [...]
Here are the elements of SEO that everyone needs to know and understand to get a web site indexed fully, ranked well and to avoid penalties. This infographic distills 200 plus signals down to the following nine main elements, each with sub-elements and strength ratings of +3 (strongest positive factor) +2, +1 and [...]
Dilbert Warned us Against Using Paid Text Links for SEO value but breaks the news to his boss that they have been penalized for paid linking.
Google found out that we use fake links to boost our search rank
Now our website only shows up when someone enters the search string ‘dung for brains’
They won’t get away [...]
Dilbert does his best to warn of the dangers of unethical SEO, telling his boss he’s an idiot in the process.
I think I’m buying the coffee mug for this one.
I want you to use “black hat” methods to raise our website ranking on search engines
What do you like best about that idea – the fact [...]
Not satisfied to simply speed up their own site – Google is now speeding up yours (if it’s the first result) from search results pages when you use the Chrome browser. They’ll be making the technology open source when it is released – so that it will be available from all browsers. Here’s a demo [...]
