Today's seniors are more connected to the Internet than ever before: they are proficient users of e-mail, can navigate the Web and are even creating Facebook and MySpace pages.

But tomorrow's seniors — the baby boomer generation — are not only connected to the Internet, they are reliant on it. For this emerging group of retirees, the Internet is the source for everything from pricing TVs and travel to locating old friends to researching health care and real estate.

And when it comes to how they use the Internet, search is one of the tools they rely on most.

Internet usage studies show that 90 percent of boomers use search engines regularly.

So given that boomers make up 35 percent of the online community, and 90 percent of them frequent search engines for product purchases, research, etc., simple math dictates that both organic and paid search will continue to become increasingly important in the world of senior housing.

This is great news for marketers, since one of the beauties of reaching a prospect via search is that you're communicating with a captive audience — someone who is inclined to find out more about your product. But of course, the key to using search successfully is distinguishing your community in a crowded online marketplace.

To effectively reach prospects through search engines, your community typically must appear on one of the first two pages of a keyword search, since most users don't go beyond the second page of search engine results. And there are a multitude of factors that play into the success of search and several methods to optimize the ranking, which I'll address in a follow-up post.

But the bottom line is that we all need to find better ways to reach potential customers, especially in this economy. With a growing number of baby boomers and seniors actively engaging online, search marketing offers a great opportunity for senior living community managers to reach them through a channel that's both relatively easy to measure and cost effective.

So why not type some keywords into Google, MSN and Yahoo, and find out how your community ranks?