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Well I have Word open and that's got to be a positive sign on one of those days when my brain is still back in bed and likely to stay there for the whole day. I hope you don't have those sort of days ... they are never fun because you're always struggling to get motivated to do anything.

Fortunately I don't have to think too hard about what to write today because SEOmoz have released their 2010 Industry Survey and we can talk about some of the findings because you may just find some of them quite helpful.

This year's survey was done online ... and no, neither Steve nor I took part in it although over 10,000 other respondents did.

Of course there are some things you should think about when you look at this review ... a large proportion of those who would have responded would be likely to have some degree of bias towards SEOmoz's view of the world and here I should say that Steve and I don't always agree with that view.

The other important thing to think about is that there's no incentive to provide truthful answers so not everyone is going to be honest in their responses.

With that in mind let's look at some of the findings of the survey. Some of them are interesting ... some are funny ... and some are just plain sad.

Perhaps the saddest one of all is that Australian SEO "experts" are more likely to file spam reports about their opposition that just about anyone else ... with the exception of Canadian and British SEOs. That just so goes against the Australian ethos of not dobbing others in and I guess that it says a lot about the people who work in this industry.

The good news from the survey is that if you buy links then it seems that you may have around a 70 percent chance of not getting caught by Google. That figure applies to links that you might have bought from a broker but it's an even safer bet to buy links directly from a webmaster because it seems that Google only manages to catch about 20 percent of paid links when they come from direct negotiation,

It also seems that search engine optimisation is not necessarily a young person's business either. Apparently that just over 33 percent of those who responded to the survey gave their age as between 31 and 40 while 26.7 percent were aged between 26 and 30. Poor Steve is definitely in the minority ... just 6 percent of respondents were aged between 51 and 60.

One interesting question for SEO consultants and agencies asked just how many clients they worked with at any one time. 17.9 percent of those who responded to the survey said that they worked with between 6 and 10 clients. A slightly smaller percentage ... 17.3 percent ... said that they worked with just 3 clients at any one time and 16 percent said that they worked with just 2 clients.

The most popular paid tool for those who responded to the survey was SEOmoz Tools. 23.1 percent said they used SEOmoz's own tools but surprisingly 60 percent of those who responded to the survey said that they used no paid tools at all.

So if around 6,000 people who described themselves as working in the search engine optimisation area said that they didn't pay to use any SEO tools what did they use? Well 85.6 percent of them said that they used Google Webmaster Tools ... 63.3 percent of them said that they used SEOMoz's free tools ... and 46.9 percent used Yahoo Site Explorer.

There was another interesting question that gives something of an insight into those who claim to be involved with search engine optimisation and who responded to the survey. Respondents to the survey were asked to indicate how many unique pages there were on the largest website that the respondents managed.

The largest number of respondents ... 21.8 percent ... said that the largest website that they managed had somewhere between 11 and 100 pages. 18.9 percent managed a site with between 101 and 500 pages and 11.9 percent managed a site with between 1001 and 5000 pages.

So where do you fit into all that? Sometimes ... especially when you're working in relative isolation ... it's easy to think that everyone else in the industry is doing so much more or achieving so much more than you are.