Does “Google Instant” Send SEO Back to the Basics?

What’s this “Google Instant” anyway?

Well, if sitting in front of your computer isn’t your livelihood, you might not know what Google Instant is. It’s a new enhancement of Google Search. In a nutshell, while you’re performing a Google Search, Instant takes what you are typing in and predicts the most likely completion of the phrase you’re searching for. Then streams results in real-time for those predictions, supposedly delivering a smarter and faster search that is extremely interactive and powerful.

Most people seem to either love it, or hate it. If you’re just a casual web surfer, and you don’t like it, or it really doesn’t matter to you, it can just be turned off in your preferences. If you do a lot of Google searches, you probably have a stronger opinion. Either way, chances are it won’t be going away any time soon. SEO Most likely, neither will the controversy that came along with it.

Will the competition keep up? Does it matter?

What there hasn’t been is a lot of talk about search engine competition keeping up. It doesn’t seem like anyone cares if the Bing/Yahoo conglomerate will be keeping up with the Joneses this time around. I’m not saying that keeping up with Google should be a top priority for Bing, but whether it is or not, they haven’t said. In fact, they seem to be laying pretty low around the whole subject.

Maybe it’s because Google Instant is uses AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) instead of HTML 5 – which many tech leaders are touting as the future of the internet. Maybe Bing is just holding their breath, waiting to see if this experiment works. Maybe they have something up their sleeve. Only time, and public opinion will tell.

What does Google Instant mean for Search Engine Optimization?

There’s been a whole lot of talk about Google Instant Search killing SEO. I don’t think that this is something that really serious SEO brendale folks are losing any sleep over. Every time one of the major search engines changes up their algorithm, there are some ripples as everyone adjusts. This time is no different. The ripples will be felt for a couple of months, and then its going to be business as usual. That is, if you really do SEO right to begin with.

A lot of people are questioning what Google Instant will mean for their already existing SEO. Basically, it means that if you are ranking well for a search phrase, you’ll still come up, as people type. It also means as they type in each letter, you’ll either stay in the results shown or be replaced as they type. What does it really mean?

The bottom line is that your page title and meta descriptions are now more important than ever, if you want to get traffic to click through from the search terms you rank for. Your sites meta data (page title and description) needs to be structured more like a Google AdWords advertisement.

The page titles and descriptions have to be deliberately relevant to what the searcher is looking for. This way, it will catch people’s attention and entice them to click through. Doing this may mean altering your content to reflect your new page title and description. That means that the content on your page should jive with the title and description of your page. Remember when SEO meant having relevant content and page titles and descriptions that are structured around it? Maybe it’s just time to get back to the basics.