The rollout of Google Instant started Wednesday in the U.S. and will continue across different regions over the coming months. According to information on Google.com:

Google Instant is starting to roll-out to users on Google domains in the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Russia who use the following browsers: Chrome v5/6, Firefox v3, Safari v5 for Mac and Internet Explorer v8.

It is not yet officially available in New Zealand but if you have a Google account you can try it out if you are logged into your Google account. Just go to google.com and if it changes to google.co.nz scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on the link ‘Go to Google.com’. If you are on the iGoogle page, do an initial search to get to the search page. You will know that Instant is turned on if you see a little message to the right of the search box that says ‘Instant is on’. Just start typing and you should see the search results appear on the page as you type – that’s if it works. In my test it worked initially but then stopped working (the results on the page were no longer being refreshed as I typed). I got it working again by starting over in a new tab.

You can also check it out by watching Google’s promo video:

Google Instant may have ramifications for some websites visibility in searches. As people start to type they will see the results of multiple search queries flash before them and may find something of interest before they have completed what they were originally planning to type. A website that shows up at the top of the results for the full query may not show up on the partial query where the searcher jumped off. It appears to me it that this could have the effect of making shorter keywords more valuable in search engine optimisation.

Another impressive advancement in Google Instant is that it takes personal information into account in the search results, so it can potentially present a different set of search results to different people typing the exact same query. This sounds like it could make SEO more challenging. Some are even making bold claims that this innovation will bring about the end of SEO – Google Instant Makes SEO Irrelevant. But Google’s Matt Cutts in his thoughts on Google Instant assures us that SEO won’t die but acknowledges that it is likely to change:

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.

1. Think of what someone looking for your type of product/service might type into a search query.
2. Write down a list of keywords/terms.
3. Think of common variations and modifiers for those terms and add them to your list.
4. Examine your website to see if those keywords already appear or find ways of adding extra text to incorporate the most important keywords.
5. Top priority is to make it human readable – you don’t want to turn people away by having your site not easy to read or seeming spammy.
6. The words in your titles and headings are given most importance by the search engines so your most important keywords should be here. The title is meta data and does not appear on the page itself but appears at the top of your browser window and also in search results. Headings do appear on your page and there are a number of different levels of headings – H1, H2, H3, etc. H1 is the top level heading and is given the most importance. Ideally you should just have one H1 heading on your page.
7. Keep the title and the main heading similar, but it is a good idea to vary them a little from each other in order to incorporate different variations of your important keywords.
8. Don’t stuff your titles and headings with keywords – this looks spammy and can dilute the effect of your keywords.
9. Some tools that can help you find important variations on your keywords: Google Adwords Keyword Tool, SEOBook Keyword Tool, Quintura, Google Search Based Keyword Tool, Google.com (click wonder wheel and/or related searches).
10. You can add a new article, page or blog post to your website on a topic centred around some keyword or term that you want to get found for. But don’t make it look spammy or manipulative – write primarily for the real people visiting your website and make sure it sits naturally into your website structure.

So what did I do to get things back on track? Well the thing that did it was to change the lang attribute in the html tag to “en-nz”:

<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” dir=”ltr” lang=”en-nz”>

This, when set, appears to be the main criteria that Bing uses to determine which region the site should be indexed in. So it looks like it overrides server location and country code top level domain. My lang attribute had previously been set to “en-us” which got picked up from the default settings in WordPress, the platform that my site is built with. After I made the change it took 1-2 weeks before things got sorted in Bing. The interesting thing is that Bing indexed a few of the internal pages before indexing the home page and other more important pages. So we had the strange situation where some of the pages of my site were showing up in the regional search results but the home page wasn’t.

Does this open up the possibility of being able to target different regions with different pages on a website? It appears that way but I’ll have to do another experiment to find out. So here’s the experiment: I’ve set up a page entitled Web Design Ireland and I’ve set the lang attribute to “en-ie” in order to see if I can get indexed in the regional search results for Ireland.

I’ll follow up soon to let you know what happens, it will be interesting to see. If you use RSS, you can follow my RSS feed from http://sww.co.nz/feed.

Aidan,

I’ve brought this up with our indexing team to see if we can find a solution. I’ll let you know as soon as I hear back.

~B

Google is still the King of search and this deal is not expected to de-throne it, but by combining their market share the Microsoft/Yahoo combo will make a more compelling platform for advertiser’s dollars.

Since it’s unveiling in May, Bing has been fairly well received. Personally however, I have no plans to switch. After trying it out a few times, it left me unimpressed with the quality of the search results. Take for example a search for “Nelson web design” (a term I check occasionally to see how sww.co.nz is ranking in local searches). Here are the top 10 search results that Bing returns right now (NZ only search):

No. 1 is a valid result, but nos 2 & 3, both from the same domain, are not at all relevant results. In fact they are just temporary development pages on the nelson.co.nz domain of our partner, Digital Promotions, and the real Digital Promotions website appears much further down at position 10. The nelson.co.nz domain crops up again in position 6, another irrelevant result, indicating an overly heavy emphasis on domain name over content. I count only 6 relevant results in the all-important top 10. Not a very smart result for an allegedly ‘smart’ search engine (or ‘decision engine’ as Microsoft prefers to call it).

Here’s what Google returns for the same search:

Hey, that’s more like it – Stellar Web Works listed at a respectable 5th position (and even finds it’s way to no. 1 in the map results!). This time all ten results are relevant.

So, after this little test my faith in Bing is definitely a bit shaky. But with the recent Yahoo deal it looks like it is going to become part of the our web developer world and something we are going to have to work with from a SEO perspective. And if it gains traction, a bit of competition for the Google monster might not be a bad thing!