SEO/SEM trends

SearchEngineWatch put out a great article this morning detailing some search engine optimization and marketing trends recently, and included some great stats too:

- currently ~2 billion people online (~30% of world population)
- North America leads with 77% of its population online, then Australia 61%, Europe 58%, Latin America 34.5%, the Middle East 29.8%, Asia 21.5% and finally Africa 10.9%
- looking at sheer numbers, Asia leads with 825 million users, then Europe 475 million, North America 266 million, Latin America 204 million, Africa 110 million, the Middle East 63 million and finally Australia is last with 21 million people online.

The article then focused on geo-targeting markets and integrating social networking in your marketing efforts. Here's some highlights:

U.S., UK Markets: social networking via Twitter, FaceBook and YouTube is the key, as is rankings with Google

WorldWide: Google is the leader but smaller local search engines are gaining popularity fast

Russia: Social networking is big, but not the people you expect. The biggest social networks in Russia are VKONTAKTE.RU with close to 73 percent reach, Odnoklassniki with some 39 percent reach, and Mail.Ru - My World with close to 33 percent.

Germany: Germans are quite focused on privacy and local payment options when shopping online.

Japan: Japan is the only stronghold left for the American search giant Yahoo, but there is a twist to that as Google powers the search results for Yahoo. For social networking, look at Mixi.

Latin America: Its all about Brazil and Mexico. Brazil has close to 75 million Internet users or around 38 percent penetration. Google is the biggest by far with close to 100 percent market share. Social networking giant in this region is Orkut.

So we were discussing some of this stuff in our Geotargeting for local search thread a while ago, and now it seems 2011 is all about integrating results for local search and local social networking. Are you doing anything to capture this new market? If you are, feel free to share with us!