The purpose of this paper is to study the steady state solutions for a nonl
ocal semilinear heat equation. The nonlocal term involves the integral of t
he solution over the spatial interval. By using some elementary differentia
l inequalities, a detailed analysis of existence and/or nonexistence of ste
ady states are given for different ranges of parameters, from which it foll
ows that some global existence and nonexistence results of solutions of the
original heat equation can be easily deduced.