SEO Book has an interesting post today on the value of a #1 Google Ranking. In the article Aaron Wall does a great job analyzing the topic and included tons of links to support his position.

A couple of points I found interesting:

• All the data on Google and the importance of the top few results. Much of the data has been around for a while but a report I hadn't see is iProspects Blended Search Results Study. A couple of good which sound accurate to me include:
• 48% of visitors click on image or video results when available as blended search
• ~50% of users revise their search after reviewing the first page of results
  
• The links to Compete's keyword destination tool. Competes tool shows the percentage of traffic each site receives for a given keyword - pretty interesting. This could in fact be a potentially fantastic tool to understand the distribute of click throughs for certain keywords, but it appears (at least on my initial tests) that the tool currently is based on a small sample size and should only be taken for what its worth
• The long tail of keywords search. I found this quote amazing: "On May 16, 2007, at the Searchology event, Google's Udi Manber state that 20 to 25% of the queries that Google sees in any given day are queries that they have never seen before" - wow