• There are 14 billion internet searches done each month (Comscore, March 09)
• CNN moved their search ranking from #4 to #1 and got 50 million more visits a month on their website
• Spending on on-line marketing is forecasted to increase 11% in 2009; search is expected to increase 14%; 60% of respondents expect to cut traditional marketing (Forrester, April 2009)
• 68% of the population of people who use search only access the first page of Google search results (Jupiter, 2008); of the webinar attendees, 30% visit the first page only and 48% visit the first two pages (but attendees are presumably more advanced search users).
• In 1998, Google indexed 26 million pages; in 2008 that number rose to 1 trillion, which means your competition for search ranking has increased 400 million percent in the last 10 years.
• If your search term delivers 5 to 10 million results, that’s considered a “competitive” term or keyword. “Disaster recovery”, for instance, delivers 19,700,000 results.

Some SEO basics:

1. Make sure your keywords are used in the content of your page. For B2B sites, the webinar speaker recommended that 100 to 500 pages of content are needed to match competitors’ search rankings.
2. Make sure your meta page descriptions are unique for each page
3. Insert your keyword(s) in the URL
4. Target inbound links to increase rankings

The new Google revisions and how they affect your content strategy:

• Go to www.google.com and search on something (try disaster recovery); on the search results page, right under the Google logo, click on Show options.
• Notice the time parameters? Those are new-which lets you sort results by when they published. And that means that fresh, keyword-rich content will become increasingly valuable for your SEO ranking.
• Also, search queries have evolved over time, such that people have increased the number of words they enter into search engines. That means the “long tail” of search becomes more relevant and that a larger number of keywords might optimize your search rankings. Those who are searching on the long tail terms are much more qualified leads than those searching on one- or two-word common terms. The depth of their search means they’re more educated and/or interested in the topic, and more likely to want to find your site and/or buy what you’re selling.
• Now, back to Google. See the Wonder wheel at the bottom of the options navigation? Click on that. It delivers a graphical taxonomy of search terms around your original term. Cool, huh? This might be helpful for your keyword strategy-e.g., use keywords that surround your original term.

The webinar was only an hour, so it just touched the surface of Google’s new functionality. But I learned enough to know that as search technologies evolve, not only should your SEO strategy evolve but also your content strategy. Make sense?