Google Instant: Is SEO Still Relevant?
Google launch its latest enhancement to search, Google Instant, on 8th Sept, 2010.
“Google Instant is a new search enhancement that shows results as you type. We are pushing the limits of our technology and infrastructure to help you get better search results, faster. Our key technical insight was that people type slowly, but read quickly, typically taking 300 milliseconds between keystrokes, but only 30 milliseconds (a tenth of the time!) to glance at another part of the page. This means that you can scan a results page while you type.” Source
You can listen to more about Google Instant in the video below:
In fact, every other article I read about Google Instant says that this is the end of SEO.
An articles says that, if you are searching for “red striped socks”, and “Redbox” or “Red Stripe beer” showed up in the query, the user may deviate from their original search.
If you click on the other suggested answers from Google Instant, chances are that you are distracted by the “Google Suggest” function rather than your intent of search had changed.
End of the day, if your purpose of search is to buy a “red striped socks”, you would go back to your query to search for it again.
Another article says “no two people will see the same web results”. well, but that is “Personalised Search” which had already been around.
I don’t agree that Google Instant would affect the basis of SEO.
The simple theory is: Why is the user searching in the first place if he doesn’t know what he wants? To try out Google Instant?
If your site is not properly optimized for the right keywords in the first place, you are not getting anywhere, be it Google Instant or not!
This is the simple reason that I feel that SEO is still relevant (not because that this is our business).
In fact, if you had done a good SEO effort, you site should come up Tops due to Google Instant.
Nevertheless, most SEO practitioners are having a wait and see attitude and in fact, I don’t seems to find any Singapore SEO players commenting on this topic.
For the time being, Google Instant is not available in Google Singapore yet, as it is been rolled out in phrases. But if you want to try it out, go to Google.com.
Keen to know how we can get your site more traffic regardless with Google Instant, call us at +65 6640 9987, or visit our SEO Singapore site.
How Google Works
How Google Works
As a company, Google focuses on three key areas: Search, Ads and Apps. Search is our core technology; ads are our central business proposition; and apps are the umbrella over our web-based software that you can access anywhere, any time. While each of these has a lot of technology under the hood, the basic tenets for Search, Ads and Apps are very simple. We’ve created some short videos explaining the principles behind our core services. For more information or to share your thoughts, visit ourHelp Forum.
How Search Works
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNHR6IQJGZs&feature=player_embedded#!
Source: http://www.google.com/howgoogleworks/
Search Engine Optimization Singapore is the process of improving a website such that it best follows the Search Engine’s algorithm, and eventually gets the website highly ranked on the natural results, and thus more traffic.
Google has a complex set of 200 algorithms!
If you like to know how you could get yourself on the first page of Google’s natural results, look for a good Singapore SEO agency to advise you. Contact us at +65 9450-0295 or info@advantageseo.net
Google: Improved localized search
4/16/2010 09:00:00 AM
We spend a lot of time thinking about search results, but we also spend a lot of time thinking about search queries. Today we’re announcing three enhancements to help you input your searches more quickly and easily: more localized Google Suggest, improved spell correction for names and auto-correction for 31 languages.
Feel at home with Google Suggest
Last year we launched localized Google Suggest by country, offering relevant popular search queries tailored for different regions. However, just as people in the U.K. often look for different things than people in U.S., we’ve found that people in Seattle tend to look for different things than people in Dallas. So last week, we rolled out a version of Google Suggest that is tailored to specific metro areas in the U.S. You may notice that the list of queries beneath the search box will seem more locally relevant than it used to:
- In San Francisco [bart] is probably not Bart Simpson; it’s probably Bay Area Rapid Transit:
- In Chicago it’s easy to find out about your local NBA team:
While Suggest can help you find good queries, sometimes you can get stuck because of misspellings. That’s why for years we’ve offered corrected spellings for mistyped searches (with the “Did you mean” link). We’ve steadily improved this spelling technology over time, but recently we made some big strides in correcting misspelled names.
People often search for people’s names — and not just celebrities and old friends. They look for doctors, horse trainers, hang-gliding instructors… the searches are just as diverse as the personalities in your hometown. We’ve noticed that people sometimes struggle to correctly spell names, and it’s not surprising. Names can be complicated and often there are multiple common spellings.
Our new technology is based on the concept that people often know something else about the person besides the approximate spelling of his name. People often include other terms such as “composer” or “lawyer sparta wisconsin” in their search query, which provides valuable context to help us narrow the range of possibilities for the spelling correction. We use these additional descriptive words to offer you better suggestions. Some examples: [matthew devin oracle], [yuri lehner stanford], [simon tung machine learning]. With these improvements you’ll start seeing more useful spell corrections for names.
For now this enhancement is available in our English spelling system in the U.S. We’ll be rolling out the change to other parts of the world and other languages in the coming months.
Another improvement we made recently to the spelling system is auto-correction. If you search for [aiprt], rather than showing you a link on your results page that says “Did you mean: airport” we’ll take you straight to the results for the corrected search. We auto-correct when we’re highly confident in our correction in order to get you the information you’re looking for that much faster. In the past week we’ve expanded auto-correction to 31 languages across over 180 domains, with more to come.
Did you make a typo while looking for [chocolate strawberries and cream] in Italian? The right word is so close you can taste it:
While saving you that unnecessary click, we make search that much faster.
Google: a new signal in search ranking algorithms!
Friday, April 09, 2010 at 11:00 AM
You may have heard that here at Google we’re obsessed with speed, in our products and on the web. As part of that effort, today we’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests.
Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.
If you are a site owner, webmaster or a web author, here are some free tools that you can use to evaluate the speed of your site:
- Page Speed, an open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement.
- YSlow, a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed.
- WebPagetest shows a waterfall view of your pages’ load performance plus an optimization checklist.
- In Webmaster Tools, Labs > Site Performance shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world as in the chart below. We’ve also blogged aboutsite performance.
- Many other tools on code.google.com/speed.
While site speed is a new signal, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point. We launched this change a few weeks back after rigorous testing. If you haven’t seen much change to your site rankings, then this site speed change possibly did not impact your site.
We encourage you to start looking at your site’s speed (the tools above provide a great starting point) — not only to improve your ranking in search engines, but also to improve everyone’s experience on the Internet.
Posted by Amit Singhal, Google Fellow and Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer, Google Search Quality Team
Source: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-in-web-search-ranking.html
Apart from improving your site speed, there are said to be over 200+ algorithm that can affect your site rankings in Google.
Read more about our Singapore SEO methodologies and know-how or contact us at tel: +65 94500295 or http://www.advantageseo.sg/contact-us
Google’s April Fools’ prank: We’re now Topeka
Google’s April Fools’ prank: We’re now Topeka
By Aaron Smith, CNNMoney.com staff writerApril 1, 2010: 11:22 AM ET
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — In the rich tradition of April Fool’s Day pranks, Google has renamed itself after Topeka, Kan., accompanied by an absurd explanation from the company’s chief.
On Thursday morning, the company’s home page was titled “Topeka” instead of “Google,” although still in its distinctive blue-red-yellow-green font.
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How Google, er, Topeka’s home page looked Thursday morning.
Why? Because in March, Topeka Mayor Bill Bunten announced that he was informally changing the name of his town to “Google,” just for one month. He told CNN that he was doing it for “fun.” This is Google’s tit-for-tat explanation, according to its official blog, posted by CEO Eric Schmidt.
“Whatever the outcome, the conclusion is clear: we aren’t in Google anymore,” blogs Schmidt.
April Fool’s Day carries a long tradition for pranks and punks, which affect every aspect of life, from the school yard to the board room. Since the advent of the Internet, companies and individuals have gotten inundated with funky e-mails making wild claims, on this day in particular.
Google has made a name for itself as one of the more proactive pranksters in the business world. Every year on April 1, the company tries to punk its followers with a new prank.
Past pranks
The naughtiness stems back to 2000, when Google claimed that its “MentalPlex” could read your mind through your computer screen, allowing users to conduct searches on sheer brain power.
“With MentalPlex, you just project a mental picture of what you want to find,” explained Google, in its 2000 posting, accompanied by a hypnotic spiral.
Last year, Google claimed its site was featuring the world’s first 3D browser, but this was just another case of April Fool’s bunk.
The strange tradition of April Fools’ mass media pranks goes back to 1957, when the BBC broadcast a weird and untrue television segment about Swiss farmers harvesting spaghetti from trees.
Naturally, many of the viewers mistakenly thought the BBC story was real.
http://money.cnn.com/2010/04/01/technology/google_april_fools/index.htm
Google's April Fool Joke 2010