Lee Odden and Jay Byrne led a terrific webinar today on the intersection of SEO and PR.  Both nailed the topic with a nice combined deck chock-full of stats.

Some juicy tidbits from Lee:

• 64% of journalists report using either Google or Yahoo! online news services to follow the news.
• Top Rank’s own survey showed that journalists used traditional search (if we have traditional search anymore) when searching for sources and info.  Only 27% are searching the news at that point, Lee says, which makes sense once someone actually produces numbers like that.
• More information here about SEO and how an online newsroom should work as I hurriedly scribble notes about optimizing those newsrooms.  Great stuff.

Some nice takeaways from Jay:

• Great data and visuals on the surface web.
• Some 65 percent of folks have visited social networks, but 58 percent don’t know what it is (I can attest to this having lived through a client bellowing that he had never heard of LinkedIn until I sent him a PDF of his profile.)
• Constant and spot-on reminders about using the words searchers, not your client, use.
• And some really terrific samples of landing pages for press releases as well as formatting.

If you missed today’s ‘cast, head over to TopRank where the blog has exploded with lots of yummy info about the PRSA Conference.

Finally, if you don’t know what we’re talking about here, your key takeaway is that your organization’s PR efforts need to be optimized for the Internet.  That special blend of techniques mixes reader-friendly issues with cues and signals to search engines.   The cost to get this right is typically minor relative to the cost of the outreach, and the payoff is massive ROI.   Give it a shot if you haven’t yet, and prepare to be amazed.