Internet Marketing Search Engine Optimization Blog – AgogDigital.com

Search engine optimization is still concerning a few major search engine ranking factors: 1. Link, 2. Keywords, 3. Content.

The link is still the heart of search. Links are the primary driver of domain authority and the key to ranking quality content.

What has been refined significantly is the way links are calculated. It’s fairly obvious and well treaded that not all links are equal, but what are the exact factors that influence authority?

We’ve moved far beyond the simple passing of PageRank currency. A significant number of factors affect the value of a link.

This a working list, so please feel free to add below in the comments.

Page Location of the Link

Several search engine patents have been filed that indicate page location affects weighting. Typically, the highest weighted links on a page are directly within the content of the page. The links most likely to be de-weighted are in the footer or the navigation structure.

Anchor Text

Anchor text is largely considered one of the most important factors in determining inbound link importance. Google often seems to filter links based on over-optimization. For example, a sudden rash of 50 incoming links with identical anchor text from low quality sites is often a pretty resounding indication of paid links.

Surrounding Text

One of the more underrated components in determining link value, the text surrounding the link itself is important in determining relevancy and weighting. Beyond understanding the importance of a link, Google uses this relevance understanding to evaluate images and video.

Theme of Page/Site

Search engines respect community-based interactions and recommendations. It should come as no surprise that a link from a keyword/domain relevant site means more than one from a page with a list of loosely related links.

NoFollow

Many webmasters mistakenly look to bloggers as a great way to pick up link juice. From the outside, it makes perfects sense. Blogs are frequently updated and run by individuals, increasing the likelihood of receiving a response to a link request.

This is now a bit of a fool’s errand. Most blogging platforms default by adding the nofollow attribute to every link.

According to Matt Cutts of Google, “In Google, nofollow links don’t pass PageRank and don’t pass anchortext.”

Are we really supposed to believe that Google ignores the link value of the entire blogosphere? Cutts’ assertion is definitely carefully worded. Perhaps these links fall into the nebulous and unexplored “social signals” section of Google’s algo.

Authority of Linking Domain

Undoubtedly the most important factor, the authority of the page on which the link sits drastically impacts the weight of the link. Depending on the authority of the linking site, it can almost completely mitigate the dampening factors.

Site Age/Link

This is a bit redundant because there’s definitely a correlation between age and domain authority, but older links are generally considered more valuable. Conversely, a bevy of fresh links for QDF results is vital for Google News rankings.

Robots.txt

An incoming link from a page excluded in the robots.txt is virtually meaningless.

No Index/No Follow

Another common tactic from reciprocal link shysters, incoming links from pages that have the “noindex, nofollow” tag are also worthless.

One-way vs. Reciprocal

Reciprocal links are typically de-weighted between smaller sites, but that’s a bit of an oversimplification.

When credible, high ranking websites send deep content links to each other, there’s little-to-no de-weighting involved. De-weighting typically occurs among smaller, lower authority sites that suspiciously have reciprocal links pointing at each other within a two-week period.

Total Number of Links

The more outbound links on the page, the less valuable the link. External links essentially split the PageRank. Like beams of light, the more splitting that occurs, the less powerful the link. Link builders are often better served by focusing on finding content that’s not inundated with other outbound links.

A client is considering whether they need to do SEO now or later when their budget is higher in next year. I think many companies have this problem: Do it now or later?

My recommendation is do it now. It is not because we offer SEO solution, it is because of the following reasons:

1. SEO is a foundation of Internet marketing. Online search is a major activity for Internet users. If your website cannot get found in search engines, your website is likely a decoration, especially for small business. For big business, they may have other offline advertising to compensate for loss of search engine traffic. However, many small business’s website traffic is originated from search engines. If you do not have search engine traffic, it simply means that you and your staff are the only visitors of your website. If this is a case for long period, you either close your website or perform internet marketing proactively.

2. You may lose to your competitors. If your competitors actively perform SEO, and get many search engine traffic. Potentially, they can capture many online business opportunities that may be yours if you also get found in search engines.

3. So, you understand why you need to do SEO. However, you hesitate to put money on this project now because you think the cost is high. However, the price will be pushed up later because of keen online competition. When competition of your industry in search engine space becomes more intense in near future, your SEO service provider is likely to charge you higher price because they need to put more effort on your project.

So, if you decide to do SEO, you must act fast! It saves your cost, and prevent the loss of business opportunities to your competitors.

Many webmasters assume that identifying on-site content duplication is a no-brainer. Assuming that you can simply cruise through your site and identify identical pages isn’t a good way to manage similar or identical content on your site.

What happens when you have thousands of pages on your site or several template pages (e.g., company location pages, e-commerce sections) sharing content, such as product pages and clearance sections?

Identifying On-Site Content Duplication

It’s not just copy that you need to be concerned with. Have you checked your title elements and meta descriptions lately?

While you won’t necessarily be dinged for duplicate content by the bots, you’re definitely not helping anything.

Cannibalizing terms in the title elements is a great way to confuse search engines about the keyword focus of individual pages. Identical meta descriptions indicate you don’t give a darn about informing and persuading a potential site visitor in the SERPs.

Tool to Use: Google Webmaster Tools >>Diagnostics>>HTML Suggestions

This tool will show you duplicate meta descriptions across your site as well as duplicate title elements. Are there are duplicate title elements present? If so, you’re likely to have duplicate pages that are generated through internal content sharing and dynamic page creation.

Not all duplicate content on-site has to be identical to offend a search engine crawler. Any page similarity over 70 percent in its entirety can raise red flags are impede ranking success. As I mentioned above, this is seen many times in multiple location pages within a site or different color product pages for instance on e-commerce sites.

Once you’ve identified areas of your site prone to excessive similarity or page duplication, you can address these issues.

The robots.txt file is a great place to start. Here you can exclude duplicating pages such as blog archive folders, blog category folders, dynamic URL parameters that duplicate pages, and such. This is the best way to keep bots away from your duplicate pages.

A tactic closely related to this is the no-index meta tag, which allows you the more functional ability to let crawlers follow links on pages without indexing a respective page. If you have dynamic URLs issues, you’re advised to notify Google of this in Webmaster Tools as you can instruct them to ignore certain parameter fields.

Another way to address similar pages is to decide which of these pages you deem the most important for a SERP ranking (i.e., possesses the most/best inbound links, is the main product page, etc.). All other similar pages can feature a canonical meta tag indicating that you realize you have similar content but you wish for search engines to focus on your desired page.

Moving forward, you can use tools to monitor duplicate content such as setting up a campaign in SEOmoz Tools to continually assess content duplicity on your site as well as maintaining a monitoring presence within your Google Webmaster Tools account.

Beyond managing the similar content on your site you didn’t know you had, it’s always a best practice to make your site content as unique and informative as possible. Your visitors will like you for it, and, oh yeah, the search engines will, too.

Steve Rubel kicked off a furore among the SEO community during the Google Instant launch event on wednesday last week, which most people were following on Youtube. The furore was specifically caused because he blogged a classic “SEO is dead” post – somewhat of a tradition among the bloggerati. Matt Cutts and Vanessa Fox were quick to respond and steer the discussion away from hysteria. Nonetheless, to give credit to where credit is due, Rubel honed in on the question on everyone’s lips, “how does Google Instant effect SEO?” Following our recent post ‘Google Instant – 10 Things Marketing Teams Need to Know’, in a discussion with the Search Engine Watch experts, it was deemed to be important that SEW address the question too.

1. Google’s Official Position
One of the marvellous effects of Twitter is that Rubel’s blog post reached audiences so quickly that the discussion had surfaced to reporters actually at the Google Instant presentation event ahead of the Q&A session. Serendipitously, Ben Parr of Mashable was able to ask the Google team sitting on the stage (among whom was Sergey Brin), and i paraphase, “what impact will Google Instant have on SEO?”.

Google responded that “ranking stays the same” and fundamentally, everything remains the same. However they emphasized that behavior may change over time – the kinds of queries you do may change over time. Obviously, this could have a tremendous impact on SEO.

2. “No two people will see the same web”… But We All Live In the Same World
The cornerstone of Rubel’s case is his statement above (quoted in the sub heading). He argued that SEO relied on users seeing the same results, and this caused certain phrases to be targeted as they had higher volume of traffic. Now users would be continually adjusting their suggestions as they search. The implied impact of “tweaking their searches in real-time” is that volume on high traffic phrases will now be distributed between every predicted suggestion as users.

“Once a single search would do the trick – and everyone saw the same results. That’s what made search engine optimization work. Now, with this, everyone is going to start tweaking their searches in real-time. The reason this is a game changer is feedback. When you get feedback, you change your behaviors.”

The statement above sounds sensible on the face of it. The likely impact of predicted searches is that users will investigate more sets of results. However, as Google said, ranking factors have not changed. So, despite streaming SERPs, results for every search term are still governed by the same algorithm – meaning that they are exactly the same regardless of how ‘instant’ they are.

As Vanessa Fox responded in her blog post, fundamentally there is a misunderstanding at the heart of Rubel’s argument – even if personalized search meant that users would not see the same web, it does not follow that users would act on different searches.

…the biggest misunderstanding of Rubel’s post is that SEO is about optimizing for a single query and that everyone saw the same results until now. In reality, searchers have been seeing different results for a really long time. Personalized search in particular has been increasing over time, causing everyone to see something different. And Google Suggest has also been around forever, so the idea of prompting refinements as the searcher types a query also isn’t new.

Sure, searchers may tweak their queries in real time, but they aren’t going to fundamentally change what they’re looking for. If I’m looking for a restaurant in Seattle, I’m not going to see results for “relaxing vacations in Mexico” and decide to go to Cabo instead of out to dinner.

As Fox illustrates, personalization of the web does not have an impact on the demands of real life, the latter of which is what people use search to overcome. Whilst I would agree with Rubel’s statement that “Google Instant… will change and personalize people’s search behaviors”, I would concur with Fox that most people’s need for search has not changed.

Even if it were true that “no one will see the same web” this would have absolutely no impact on the everyday needs of a searcher or the way in which a searcher chose the right result. Someone looking for a holiday, is still looking for a holiday whether the web is personalized or not. Whilst new user signals introduced by Google Instant may have an impact on what the user discovers, all of the new features increase the avenues of discovery and choices available to them rather than creating limits. The user still has choice at every single step of the search to conversion process, and an increase of choices within the ‘query space’ of the funnel, frees up the market even more – but the fundamental direction of their choice remains aligned to the actual need and not what they see.

In summary, Google Instant makes finding the answer faster, whilst the market for the answer has not changed in any way. If the demand for search remains strong, the need for SEO remains no matter how personalized the web is.

3. “Feedback changes your behavior”… But Any Behavior Change Increases Dependency
The gold nuggets in Rubel’s position however is that Google Instant is fundamentally about personalization via the feedback mechanism. Ben Gomes talked in detail of the feedback mechanism within Google instant. Built on a complicated hardware and software architecture, lesser known Google search features such as Spelling Corrections, Starred results, Trends, Hot-Trends, Google Squared and Google Suggest ultimately power the user feedback loop by organizing and incorporating real time data back into the search interface. Relatively speaking, aside from Google Suggest, these product features are still in their infancy, and whilst personalization was not specifically covered in the presentation, it’s not far fetched to see how Google Instant sets an interesting new blueprint for personalized search results.

However, whilst I somewhat agree with Rubel’s statement that, “Real-time feedback will change and personalize people’s search behaviors,” I would say that it absolutely is far fetched to believe that such a change is radical enough to affect SEO.

As has already been argued, even if search was personalized to a high degree, it would have a minimal impact on SEO because the need for search does not change with personalization. Matt Cutt’s response to Rubel, develops this objection further to argue that if anything the need for search increases as the method of discovery improves.

[Q: Will Google Instant change search engine optimization?
] I think over time it might. The search results will remain the same for a query, but it’s possible that people will learn to search differently over time. For example, I was recently researching a congressperson. With Google Instant, it was more visible to me that this congressperson had proposed an energy plan, so I refined my search to learn more, and quickly found myself reading a post on the congressperson’s blog that had been on page 2 of the search results.

As Matt Cutt’s shows, the feedback loop created new avenues to discover related topics which led him to conduct more and more queries. The crucial innovation to watch regarding Google Instant is whether feedback feeds search – to generate more queries per user.

Form To Function
Other bloggers have also chimed in on the question of whether Google Instant kills SEO to develop some of the common sense points raised by Fox and Cutts with more concrete examples. What emerges from their objections is that there is a fundamental disconnect between the form to function of Google Instant. It’s designed to make search “faster than the speed of type” yet in effect the UI change restricts what is actually possible. Firstly, the personalization of Google Instant is simulated. Secondly, Google Instant changes the value of SERP real estate. Thirdly, Google Instant could lead users to the dark side of nonsense.

4. Only Search Suggestions Are Personalized – Instant Results Pages Are NOT
Rae Hoffman of Outspoken media, in her typical fashion, stops Rubel’s argument dead in the water with the point that Google Instant results are ultimately the same for everybody.

The “Instant” results may vary from the traditional Google ones… but everyone using Instant, from what we can tell, gets the same “Instant results.” And SEO (and by that I mean both technical SEO and marketing SEO) is still how you get your website to the top of both.

In fact, the search results pages are no more personalized than they have been for at least 12 months, via features such as starred results, web history, and social circle results. The only aspect of Google Instant that is personalized is the terms it suggests and this again is a misnomer. As noted in our previous post, the suggestions are localized based on your IP address. So a search for ‘carpet cleaners’ will suggest local search terms that approximate to a service nearby.

5. Lack of SERP Real Estate Leads to a Price War Which Benefits SEO
Aaron Wall from SEObook investigates the page coverage of a single results page based on browser size and concludes that “when Google includes 4 AdWords ads only 50% of web browsers get to see the full 2nd organic listing, while only 20% get to see the full 4th organic listing.”

The net effect of this will be a price war for top paid ad positions and even more competition for the top spots in the organic results. Wall concludes, “Google instant only increases the value of a well thought out SEO strategy” because:

* It consolidates search volume into a smaller basket of keywords

* It further promotes the localization of results

* It makes it easier to change between queries, so its easier to type one more letter than scroll down the page

* It further pollutes AdWords impression testing as a great source of data

In support of Wall’s argument is Google’s own eye-tracking study data, presented at the launch event. Whilst premium ad spots are not shown in this example, the screenshots below clearly show that the results immediately below the search box get the most attention, as do localized results.

5. Users Are Not Stupid
Charlie Brooker, a comedian, writer and journalist, also notes that many of the search suggestions led him down a black hole of productivity. Whilst Brooker consistently plays for laughs, I am sure many can relate to his first experience with Google Instant. I certainly can – the first thing I did on Google Instant was see how much nonsense I could get it to predict.

Back in that room, bombarded by alerts and emails, repeatedly tapping search terms into Google Instant for no good reason, playing mindless pinball with words and images, tumbling down countless little attention-vortexes, plunging into one split-second coma after another, I began to feel I was neither in control nor 100% physically present. I wasn’t using the computer. The computer was using me – to keep its keys warm. (Apart from “enter”, obviously. I didn’t even have to press that.)

Fastcompany also note that Google Instant plays right into Microsoft’s hands — especially given the company’s “Search Overload Syndrome” ad campaign. Everything about Google Instant search screams search overload–the unfortunate side-effect of sifting through millions of results regardless of relevancy.

The biggest challenge Google Instant faces is persuading people that the search suggestions are relevant all of the time. If suggestions stop being shortcuts, or become continual distractions, it may be sudden death for the streaming results UI.

6. Recognition is not Relevance
A theme that got played around with a few times, slightly uncharacteristically, at the Google event was the ability of something to be ‘psychic’. Not being psychic, I was personally disappointed to discover some presentations were peppered with notions of a some sort of psychic robot, as it undermined the pure maths that makes suggested discovery workable.

A real life psychic, such as the types you find on every block of New York City, plays on their worldliness to suggest possibilities that might happen to their subject. The effectiveness of the ‘reading’ is totally dependent on their ability to trigger recognition of possible outcomes in their subject. Yet, it’s their subject’s own experience that judges the validity of any scenario. The more they recognize themselves in the reading, the more open they are to possibilities that the psychic presents the more they are inclined to believe that what is being said is relevant to them. The opposite is also true – if the subject does not recognize anything that the psychic is saying, they will deem the reading nonsense. However, the tension between truth and nonsense is so taut that we tend to see them in absolute terms – we sustain and elevate truth to a priority concept and disregard nonsense to such an extent that we drop the notion entirely.

Predicted search operates in a similar way. Based on a series of guesses and a tonne of data it Google Instant can offer a series of bets as to what you might be searching for. But that’s all they are – bets based on a data set.

Every search conducted and every result retrieved and every every listing clicked on are, at best, a continuous series of guesses. The first search made was, at best, a guess as to what their specific need was in contrast to the all the worlds information. The results the search engine returned, were at best, a guess based on mathematical relationships in contrast to a set of identified keywords. The result a user clicks on was the best guess a user can make on the results offered by the search engine. With all this uncertainty at the heart of search, it’s a wonder search works at all.

Yet it does work, simply because chance itself exists. Even if the odds of any particular scenario were a one in a million, a chance nonetheless means it can actually happen. One correct prediction is a satisfying experience of recognition that deepens trust and leads to a deeper inquiry into the subject. The net effect is that, just like as with a Psychic, your information needs change as your trust increases. Matt Cutts discusses the exploration of questions in his own post:

…with Google Instant I find myself digging into a query more… I can get a preview of what the results will be, add or subtract words to modify my query, and hit enter at any time. The ability to explore the query space and find out new things will inevitably lead to changes for SEO. When I was in grad school, I had a professor who mentioned that peoples’ information need often change over the course of a search session. Google Instant makes that process even easier: people can dig into a topic and find out new areas to explore with very little work.

And if it doesn’t happen, well, it just didn’t happen. Google Instant has very little to lose, as it just guessed wrong and the user will ignore the suggestion as nonsense anyway.

The unique selling point of real time search engines such as OneRiot and Wowd is exactly the same. For example, using sophisticated topic clustering techniques from crawled data, One Riot can ‘predict’ trending topics based on likely outcomes from a collection of related news stories.

And get this: user behavior signals make the prediction element become more accurate, the less data there is.

7. SEO Success is Totally Dependent on the Search UI (as it ever was)
Recognition generates more clues as to where relevance might lie, but neither pertain to the other. Think about it – something you recognize is not necessarily relevant, and something that is relevant does not necessarily mean that you recognize it. A similar interplay of recognition and relevance is determined by the concept of search ‘rankings’. The continual assumption is that the top results are the most relevant results.

The search marketing industry exists as a whole precisely due to user search behavior. Despite a trillion web pages of options, the vast majority of users barely scan results and rarely look beyond the first page. It’s this economy of attention that everyone is trading on.

Furthermore, recognition is something that search engines and search marketers in general have been grappling with since time immemorial. Bolded results were deployed by search engines to provide stronger signal to users that matches have been found. Most SEOs build on that search behavior to re-architect websites in such a way that a high degree of visual match is shown to the user. Similarly, PPC ads are written in such a way to trigger the ‘bolding’ of ad text against their match types. Google Instant is no different, and the eye-tracking screenshot below taken from the presentation, shows how users are still looking for the exact same ‘emboldened text’ signal to determine their choice of click.

The upshot of the tension between recognition and relevance, on search engines, is that a user’s need for an objective ‘uncolored’ view of the world persists, yet is equally tainted by a need for familiarity – and that paradox is directly expressed through search. Users want to find their own way to content, but also want to have the route signposted.

Google Instant’s predictions are simply signposts for the user and an attempt at displaying the fact that it ‘recognizes’ the topic. As a cluster of relevant topics are discovered, the query gets more complex and predicted suggestions help users to explore that topic and think laterally by generating recognizable directions that the user can take. This has got to be a good thing for SEO as the suggestions fragment the market on high volume terms and promote more specific variations.

Branching Topics, Suggested Money Trees
To conclude, it is more likely that predicted search suggestions will increase volume on the mid-tail and longtail, because Google can effectively monetize by increasing competition on AdWords. Suggested search terms are likely to increase the amount of traffic on all of the ‘predicted’ search terms. The technology effectively multiplies one search into 5 possible searches. Local services stand to benefit most in the short term. Taking the ‘carpet cleaners’ example from the previous post, the localization of suggestions may distribute the demand further along the tail of local suppliers. This is great news for SEO and smaller businesses.

A key motive for streaming search results, aside from speedy delivery, is justified by Google’s business model in general, rather than part of a wider move to eradicate spam or ‘kill SEO’. More searches per user naturally increases the revenue that Google can generate via AdWords. If Google keep innovating Instant and make it’s search suggestions more timely and more effectively draw lateral connections in real-time across then we should see an overall increase in usage. The key statistic we will be looking for over the next few months is to find out whether the Google Instant UI has increased the ratio of searches per user. Ultimately, that will be the signal that the feedback loop of instant results is here to stay.

Creating a keyword list is step one in any search execution effort. We won’t delve into traditional keyword research tactics here; this post is designed to give marketers the tools to understand if their website can rank for a specific keyword.

It’s also important to remember that keywords vary tremendously in terms of their competitiveness. Think of building domain power the way a weightlifter might. Just because a website isn’t strong enough now doesn’t mean it won’t be in the future.

That’s why I deliver keyword lists to clients that are categorized by:

* The words a site can rank for now.

* Slight reach keywords.

* Keywords that will take a significant level of time/effort.

Here’s a quick guide to give webmasters the power and ability to understand the likelihood of ranking for a keyword.

Competitive Analysis Question 1: Does Your Site Have the Authority to Rank?

Because search engines rank domains based on relevance and authority, it’s important to first understand your domain’s authority and likelihood of ranking for a keyword. This means a competitive analysis must be performed.

First, enter your keyword of choice into Google and pull the top five results. Next, triangulate the data from these three tools to get a clearer picture of what’s required:

This question is relatively simple to answer, and the critical data required understanding the answer lies within three easily obtainable pieces of data:

* Total Number of Incoming Links: Using Yahoo Site Explorer, look at the total number of incoming links for every site that appears in the top five of a SERP. Generally, the pages with the highest number of incoming links appear at the top. While the quality of incoming links may vary greatly, the total quality usually normalizes over a larger sample. This piece of information is exceptionally helpful in terms of understanding the realistic attainability of rank. If the top ranking page has 300,000 incoming links and you only have 300, it might be time to pick a different keyword.

* Google PageRank: For years, webmasters have overvalued PageRank. It is more often misused as a measure of self-worth than actual site performance. In this case, it’s a solid indicator of ranking likelihood. If your site has a PR5 and competitors have PR8, it’s likely a non-starter for immediate ranking.

* Incoming Link Quality: It’s a belabored point, so I won’t bother elaborating, but any SEO worth his salt understands that not all links are the same. So, how do you quickly determine if your links are as good (or better) than your competitors? Yahoo Site Explorer typically ranks (albeit imperfectly) the strongest domains first. Simply go to Yahoo Site Explorer and perform a quick examination of the links to discover when the drop off to lower quality domains begins for each site. In Site Explorer, you’ll notice quality drop off points when there are dozens of listed links from the same domain, you start seeing Blogspot links, and the links appear to be spammy scraped dupe links from other pages.

Competitive Analysis Question 2: Does Your Site Have the Right Type of Authority?

Based on the themes, goals, and motivations of your site, it might be completely unrealistic to rank for a keyword. That’s because Google tries to understand user intent based on the type of keyword entered into a search engine.

Let’s take a look at a few keywords and logically match them to user intent:

* Keyword 1: “Michael Jackson” — commonly referred to as a head term, this keyword is typically one that would be entered by an information seeker looking to learn more about Michael Jackson. Correspondingly, Google will deliver informational-based pages that carry high domain authority, cover a broad variety of subject matter (that isn’t just Michael Jackson themed), and deliver higher levels of content than other websites. Hopefully, this example should assist in explaining why Wikipedia ranks in the top five for every broad keyword under the sun. Additionally, Google tends to strongly favor flagship “brand domains” in the first position (in this case, it’s michaeljackson.com).

* Keyword 2: “Michael Jackson Memorabilia” — in this example, the user’s intention is radically different from “Michael Jackson.” Generally speaking, the focus shifts from informational to product-based, meaning domain authority weighting will be dampened, with the word “memorabilia” providing a key specificity modifier.

Key Takeaways

Remember to ask the following questions when including a keyword in your portfolio:

* Do I have the authority to rank for this keyword?

* Is my site thematically relevant?

* Will search engines reward my website (information, sales, service, blog) with the corresponding query?

This finalized keyword list should help you create a formalized search strategy that should dictate the type of content needed to meet these ranking objectives.

Google announced yesterday that they would launch Google Instant. What was announced was arguably the biggest change in the user interface (UI) of search engine results pages since search engines were invented and one of the most sophisticated engineering projects for Google since Caffeine.

Ben Gomes, Distinguished Engineer at Google, had a great phrase to summarize the announcement, “Google Instant seems so obvious, that in retrospect, you’ll wonder if search could have been any other way.”

1. Backstory: Google Instant Was Not Born Yesterday
The product innovations that foreshadow Google Instant have been in development for over the last 10 years. They are:

* Improved Spelling Corrections

* Google Squared integration into universal search results

* Google Realtime

* The Caffeine index

* Google Suggest (Autocomplete)

* Starred search results

With that in mind, it would be fair to argue that Google Instant is of equivalent significance to marketers as the Universal Search update, which previously amalgamated their video, news, blogs, maps and image search properties into one search engine results page (SERPs). As was the case then, lost real estate for organic search results presented new opportunities for the savvy marketer. The same is likely to be true now.

2. Core Features Mean Less Key presses
Google Instant is a much faster interface and promises to save users 2-5 seconds per search.

* Streaming Search Results – relevant search results are displayed as you type. There is no need to press ‘enter/return’ key or click the search button.

* Predictive text – Google Instant offers predictions of what you are searching for as you type. These predictions display in light gray text as a continuation of your query. A match to your needs can be autocompleted with the hit of the ‘tab’ key.

* Scroll to Search – search suggestions/predictions display below the search box and will automatically display those results as you select them with your ‘arrow down’ key.

3. Present Availability – Coming to a Browser Near You
It is worth emphasizing that a comparatively small proportion of all Google users will see Google Instant. Those people not signed into their Google Accounts, or not searching from within the countries listed below or who only search directly from their browser will NOT see streaming search results for awhile to come.

* At present Google Instant is only available in the USA, but it will be launching in the UK, France, Italy, Germany, Spain and Russia within a week.

* The service is only available to users signed into their Google Accounts

* The service works on these browsers: Chrome v5/6, Firefox v3, Safari v5 for Mac and Internet Explorer v8

* Browser based search plugins for IE 8, Firefox, Safari and Chrome are currently in development and expected to be completed by the end of the year.

* Google Instant will hit mobile devices by fall of this year.

4. YES, You Can Turn Off Google Instant
As this feature functions for signed in users only, turning off Google Instant is extremely straightforward:

A) You can click the off switch next to the search box (as shown below – click to enlarge).

B) You can adjust your settings via the Google.com/preferences page

5. How Does it Affect Paid Search?
Google’s official line is that, Google Instant does not affect the underlying algorithm of paid search ads in any way. However, they go on to say in a blog post that it “changes the way we think about [ad] impressions.” The key takeaways for paid search account managers are that an ad impression will be counted if:

* User chooses a query from the suggestions (by hitting enter or clicking the search button).

* User clicks any link on the search results page.

* ‘The 3-second rule’: AdWords will count impressions for every ad served where the user is inactive, and stops typing, for more than 3 seconds.

6. How Does it Affect Search Queries?
In much the same way as described above for Google AdWords accounts:

* Google Webmaster Tools accounts may see an increase in impressions for search terms.

* Sites that rank well across both broad and long tail terms may see a spike of impressions on broad terms as results are streaming whilst the user narrows their search.

* Importantly, the autocomplete feature of Google Instant will pass the search term referrer as the full predicted keyword, even if the user clicked the result with a partially formulated search phrase.

7. YES, You Can Track Google Instant Behaviors Using Web Analytics
There are a couple of ways you can do this:

* BASIC: Segment your reports to track search queries from Google that come via these browsers: Chrome v5/6, Firefox v3, Safari v5 for Mac and Internet Explorer v8. However, this method will only track the fully predicted keyword referrer, and you will need to add more browsers as they become supported.

* ADVANCED: Some bright sparks at Semetrical have already identified a unique parameter within the Google Instant that passes along the inputted characters into the search field. Look for the parameter ‘oq=’ and you will see that it matches your current text input – see screenshot below. To get your account setup to track the actual inputs against the referrers, checkout Semetrical’s guide on how to track Google Instant in Google Analytics. This method will enable you to track the actual query input against the predicted referrer, which means you can see how many search suggestions your site appears in.

8. B Stands For Back In Business (But Only Big Brands Benefit)
A crucial innovation to keep your eye on is that one letter search query inputs trigger predictive results. Right now, it’s not completely clear how often the predictive engine is updating and whether this will follow general trends, hot trends or simply high volume terms in general. A search for the letter B, currently predicts ‘bank of america’ as the full term, with ‘best buy’, ‘bing’ and ‘bed bath and beyond’ as suggestions. These are all household names so one would suspect that these are simply designed to be shortcuts based on longterm demand.

However, some surprises can be found from analyzing all of the suggestions on every letter. There is anecdotal evidence that Google may also be predicting specifically current trends or hot trends. For example the letter ‘I’ suggests ‘Inception’, ‘L’ suggests ‘Lost’ and ‘J’ suggests ‘Jersey Shore’. The latter is particularly conspicuous amongst the other suggestions and the fact that streaming results focus on the TV series, rather than the location. By contrast, Google Squared results, listed as ‘something different’ are focussed on location. As Google tweaks it’s predictive results, expect to see more ‘trending topics’ in the suggestion box.

9. Stop Words & New Opportunities
Google Instant is as family conscious as any other Google product. Meaning that defamatory phrases or ‘adults only’ phrases will not be offered as predictions. Streaming results will draw a blank and you will be prompted to ‘Press Enter to search’.

However, other opportunities surface via suggestions and Google Squared. Check out the screenshot below (click to enlarge) and you will see that the well known phrase “do unto others” has been parsed by Google Squared, and triggered an ad based upon it’s classification as ‘the golden rule’.

10. What Does it All Mean?
There is a lot of speculation now as to what it could all mean. This is what i think:

* It’s a bigger opportunity on mobile devices than it is on desktop. Mobile users tend to be signed into their Google accounts so theoretically it should massively increase the number of mobile ad impressions served.

* Streaming results may encourage paid search account managers to try targeting broader terms as this will promote a lot more movement in AdWord listings.

* Personalization looks like it is on the agenda because coupling signed in users with predictive search will eventually pave the way for demographic based keyword targeting. Anecdotally, there is already evidence for location based personalization. For example, when i search for ‘carpet cleaning’ it shows me predictions for NYC – try the same search from your IP Address or via a proxy – does Google Instant localize your suggestions?

It does not mean Google have killed SEO as some speculate. But that, Ladies & Gentlemen, is another story.

Most search engine optimization (SEO) agencies are now accepted as an integral part of their customers’ wider marketing strategy — and that’s because it’s increasingly obvious that SEO underpins every other online promotional tool. However, some SEO experts only write keyword stuffed web pages and said they are doing SEO.

However, it may be not the SEO strategy you would like to pursue because:

Google is Evolving

Google is the most successful search engine in the world and Google don’t want to deliver keyword-stuffed garbage content to their users.

Yes, your website content needs to include relevant search terms because you need to show Google and other search engines that your page is relevant to the customer. However, Google wants to give people useful information. Google’s engineers are constantly working to refine its algorithm to make sure that’s what it does.

Therefore, your copywriting must consider deliver useful information but not keyword-stuffed copy.

Damaging Brand Name of Your Business

Poor quality copy on your website damages your brand in the eyes of any humans who visited your site. Keyword-stuffed copy usually sounds not natural and strange. Human may be not interested to read or simply cannot understand such a copy. Your potential customers judge your creditbility through reading your website copy.

Poor quality, keyword-stuffed, useless content lowers your brand’s value in the eyes of the customer. The customer is the only customer — not the search engine that brought them there.

Poor Copy Won’t Convert

Poor quality content won’t help you achieve your website marketing purpose. Think about this: If you are trying to sell something, human cannot understand your copywriting, will they buy?

You can’t have some copy on the site that you hope humans won’t read. Those searchers who do land on it will quickly leave your site. Anyway, copywriting only focuses on SEO and stuff keywords heavily cannot convert your website visitors into customers.

You Won’t Get Any Inbound Links

Inbound links are essential for improving your search engine ranking. However, no webmasters want to link to a low-quality and keyword stuffed copywriting web page. Webmasters only want link to high quality and informative content. So, why not provide quality content and attracts natural links and website traffic? It is the only proper SEO technique and can really improves your search engine ranking.