Website Owners Need To Make Changes For Google Instant SEO   Source: Sean Odom (Sean@SEOTechMasters.com) Last Updated 2 hours and 4 minutes ago

“Google Instant” started on September 8th and has created a lot of hype around the effects it will have on search marketing and Search Engine Optimization(SEO).  Not just organically but also on sponsored listings.   

 

Google Instant turns search into a real-time stream of results which flow onto your screen as you type your query. With each letter you type, a whole new set of results flash by. This is important for several reasons.  First and foremost, you will now see many more search results than you would have by typing in your search query and just pressing enter.

 

This will probably have an immediate effect on a users search patterns and cause people to shy away from doing a click through to the second page or more of the search results.  Google’s average user behavior and keyword usage will most likely change as a result of Google Instant.

 

This is by far the most significant change to Google’s user interface since it launched its Universal Search in May of 2007. One thing is absolutely clear.  SEO has changed with this new addition as well.  It is not an algorithm change but it will change the basic SEO strategy that a website currently uses to have people find their products or services on Google.    

 

At the basic level there are many things as a website owner or SEO guru should know.  Including the fact that Google Instant will likely affect only a portion of Google searches.   Why, well there are several limitations such as:

Google Instant functionality is turned off in the following circumstances:

1. If you are not logged in to a Google account.

2. If a user types a search query directly into a browser or toolbar.
3. If you are located outside of the US, UK, France, Italy, Germany, Spain or Russia.
4. If your browser is outdated.
5. If you are using mobile search. (It is rumored that Google plans to introduce Google Instant in to mobile search later in the year.)
6. If you choose the deactivate Google Instant.

NOTE: It is definitely worthy to note that not all searches are at Google.com. They are in search bars such as in Firefox or in the URL bar in the case of Google Chrome.

So how do I modify my website’s SEO practices to help me with users search pattern changes in optimizing my website?   Do I just optimize pages for parts of keywords?  The answer surprisingly is a ‘no’.   Google definitely hates websites with bad mechanics.  Spelling issues are a problem with gaining relevance on Google so that is definitely not the answer.   

 

So what is the answer?    For this you need to know a little bit about the history of Google and really understand a major driving force behind this change in their search engine results page (SERPS).  As recently as 2008, you could optimize a page and find relevance for 15 to 18 keywords.   In 2009, it became smaller.  For most website to find good ranking pages they needed to concentrate on less than 5 to 8 keywords in 2009.  In 2010, it became 1 to 3 keywords.    This new indexing method makes it really one page optimized for one keyword.

 

Why would Google do this?   Well only around 5-7% of the websites out there employ SEO techniques and only a small number of those get good SEO technique updates and follow the latest techniques.   The rest of those website owners don’t know how to make multiple landing pages, get indexed correctly, stay up on the latest SEO principles, and understand site maps so they can focus on multiple keywords.  

 

This means that the average website not employing the latest SEO techniques to focus on multiple keywords has to pay money to stay competitive for more than one keyword.   For Google this money goes primarily to AdWords and this is going to be a cash windfall for Google.    The fewer the words you can stay competitive for, the more you need AdWords to stay on the first page of Google.  

So what do I need to do to stay on top and be found with users new search behaviors?   Through our testing of Google Instant we have determined that a majority of the time Google is looking at the first word of the characters in the domain name, Title tag, and third the words in the Meta description tag to decide the most relevant pages to display.  You should modify your web pages or add pages so that your singular keyword search term on your pages contain only the individual key search term and its plural form.  Here is an example:

<title>USB Converter | USB Converters</title>

You will have to create pages and optimize them for other keywords you have in secondary or later positions to remain competitive for those keywords.  Don’t forget you need to modify your Meta Keyword and Meta Description tags to include your keyword as well using your first keyword in the Meta Description tag as well. 

For most website owners these changes will be a burden, but the sooner the changes are made, the sooner you will reap the rewards.   Most company websites will see their positions on their full keyword string staying in the same position on Google when they type the full keyword and probably feel the new letter by letter search results won’t affect them.  That is until they see their visits drop dramatically.  

If you make changes right away, you will reap the immediate reward of being found in searches before others catch on to the changes they need.  Remember that what you do today takes time for Google to visit your website, index your website and then change their SERP result.  So the sooner you do this the better.