The document revealed that ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers had announced a decision to explode its restrictions on generic top level domain (gTLDs) registrations; meaning that from January 12 2012 any word in any language or in fact script can be registered as a domain suffix.

22 recognised domain extensions are currently in use, from .com and .co.uk to .biz and .info but the announcement by ICANN yesterday will undoubtedly lead to a great increase. From countries and cities to institutions, hotels and brands; in what has been labelled the ‘right of the dot’ movement organisations, CEOs and representatives will have the opportunity to buy into completely new domains that will professedly increase brand awareness and identity.

According to the article Australian domain registration firm Melbourne IT whose clients include Volvo, LEGO and GlaxoSmithKline have already experienced a surge of interest from brands looking to apply for their own unique extensions, chief executive Theo Hnarakis stating that, “It will allow corporations to better take control of their brands…For example, .apple or .ipad would take customers right to those products.”

It is thought that around 500 to 1000 new domains will be registered which ICANN hope will also alleviate the rather congested .com market with many companies and groups falling over themselves to find relevant domain names producing inevitable overlaps. To lay claim to a particular domain though, a prospective applicant must demonstrate a viable authority and relevance toward that extension; if two or more parties contend over the same name it is thought ICANN will auction the license off to the highest bidder. One of the first firms to back the change has been Canon, the Japanese imaging company, who have openly expressed their intention to purchase .canon.

Budgetary clout will no doubt play a large role in this new system with an application fee set at £114,000 and a further substantial yearly subscription charge this is undoubtedly a privilege reserved for the most successful or well funded enterprises and out of the reach of most SMEs. ICANN have however stated that around $2million has been set aside to aid applicants from developing countries where the, “evaluation fee or access to technical expertise might be somewhat of a bar”, according to senior vice president Kurt Pritz.

So what do reckon to all this domain denomination? Well there have certainly been mixed reviews in the office; a lot of people are somewhat skeptical about this innovation suggesting that it will just cause confusion for internet users trying to find their desired domain when the suffix could now be almost anything. The overall implementation of this process will no doubt take several months not to mention time for the domains themselves to start competing against existing TLDs and for users to grasp the concept. How this will affect the strength of .com and other extensions in terms of SEO domain url strength only time will truly tell. In the meantime though, I wonder if we are gifting even more influence to search engines that we may soon not only rely upon to uncover content but to actually find the domains themselves; www.wmps.digitalagency hmmm.

ICANN open floodgate to domain extensions is a post from WMpS, your one stop digital agency.

The problem: Duplicate content is a massive problem. If your site’s content is also elsewhere, Google may consider you the copy and downgrade you in favour of another site.

The solution: While you may wish to include manufacturer’s copy in something like a product description, you should always have some content entirely your own on every page. A large ecommerce retailer might opt for customer-generated reviews in this scenario; writing a description for each and every product is time consuming and with reviews, your customers will not only do the work for you but will help encourage others to buy if your products are well received and generate good reviews. Sites with fewer pages should invest enough time to have some unique copy on each page.

The problem: Thin content is short with nothing to add to the end user. It may be spun or exist solely for SEO purposes, so it may exist in a slightly modified form somewhere else.

The solution: Thicken up that content with extra copy and adhere to stricter guidelines. While a search engine probably can’t tell that your content has become massively more persuasive, a variety of external factors such as click-through rate, bounce rate, and time on page may be considered either now or in the future.

If you can’t add much copy onto a transactional site, consider introducing a blog to help out with more in depth and long tail content to get your rankings up across the site. It’s also easier to encourage authority links to a blog page, which will help increase the overall authority of your site.

The problem: Too many ads. Even though Google makes money from AdWords and AdSense, a high proportion of ads above the fold on your site often indicates a spammy site, leading to lower rankings for legitimate sites as well as low quality ones.

The solution: Remove some of your ads at the top. In many cases, they won’t all be making money for you anyway. Find out which ads are more successful – banner ads or text ads, for example – and keep those while getting rid of others. Look for other ways to monetise your site, such as ebook publication or affiliate partnerships, that don’t require spammy-looking ads at the top of every site.

While rankings are generally slow to recover on sites that suffer from the Panda update, these best practices will help you set a good standard for the future.

Correcting Thin Content on Your Site is a post from WMpS, your one stop digital agency.

This update’s main focus appears to be on low quality content. Google is punishing sites that don’t provide real value to the people who visit them. These are sites such as article directories, how-to sites, and scraper sites that are piggybacking off others’ content. There is no word yet on whether the impacted sites’ links actually pass less ‘link juice’ than they did previously. Regardless, if you’re solely relying on low quality content farms for your SEO strategy, you’re going to need to come up with a new solution; they may not have implemented this yet but we can almost guarantee they will in the future.

What should you be doing to ensure the impact to your site is minimal?

1.      Write your own content, and write it well. This is something we have always recommended and will continue to do so. Even if you are selling products that are sold on many other websites and in offline catalogues, it is essential to keep the content on your site fresh, interesting, and unique. Not only will this help you rank better, effectively written selling copy will push more products and entice more users to click through and purchase.

2.      Monitor your backlinks. You should be conscious of any links coming from sites impacted by Panda and thus aware of the possible devaluation of those links. If you’re heavily affected by newly classified spam sites, you may wish to consider asking for the removal of those links and focus more time on high quality, genuine, natural links – even if the spammy links were natural. As we all know, not all links are created equal. This is especially important given Google’s recent crackdown on paid links and public exposure of sites known to be breaking the rules.

3.      Focus more of your energy on social media. While not every site is naturally aligned with social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook, there are a variety of niche sites and opportunities; this can make a difference not only to your rankings but to your image. If your company isn’t suited to social media, ask yourself whether any aspects of it can be incorporated and focus a campaign on those. For example, a company that makes engines isn’t going to be an instant win on Facebook, but can appeal to the average customer by creating a page on choosing an eco-friendly engine or even educating the general public about how an engine works. These signals are now officially used in rankings; while you’re waiting for the Panda / Farmer update to get sorted out, consider an increased investment in social.

Preparing for the Google Panda Update UK is a post from WMpS, your one stop digital agency.

Reading the post myself, perhaps the most salient and memorable insight that was raised concerned the relationship between video content and SERPs and explicitly that videos are more than fifty times more likely to feature in Google’s universal results than a respective text document. Taking this on board perhaps it is time we took a closer look at video search engine optimisation or vseo for short (it’s initialism gone mad!).

Video content, as we have learned from Meghan’s post, can prove incredibly valuable to rankings particularly if your video file and your target page are linked; as far back as 2008 for example more search queries in the US were entered into YouTube than Yahoo which goes to show that people are certainly accustomed to pursuing search terms with the goal of finding specific multimedia content. Significantly, in universal search results, a combination of Google’s vertical search properties which includes images, maps and videos etc., it is in fact videos that visually dominate the SERP interface. However, with millions of clips out there floating around in cyberspace the next challenge comes with the task of having your video promoted prominently and accurately in Google’s results. This as you might expect is achieved by getting your content crawled and indexed by Google, in this case Google Video, the database used by the search engine to collect all of the information about the multimedia that it discovers on the web. Ensuring that your clip is indexed by Google Video is a key strategy towards having it appear in the universal results because the video content Google actually displays there is taken directly from Google Video.

The most fundamental step towards getting your desired multimedia content indexed by Google is creating a video sitemap. A video sitemap, just like a normal sitemap that contains all of the information that indicates the architecture of website, contains information integral to the content of the video for example the URL for your landing pages, where the video can be found, thumbnails and the titles of the videos themselves. Information that particularly in the case of multimedia might otherwise not become available via the usual crawling mechanisms.

An alternative to using a video sitemap is an MRSS or media RSS, an extension of the traditional RSS that is used for syndicating multimedia files. Generally speaking though, sitemaps are preferred as they provide publishers with more control over the content that they are trying to get indexed.

Sitemaps can be submitted via Google Webmaster tools, after which the Googlebots will crawl the specified page and verify that the video it is proposed exists on that URL is actually there. When submitting a sitemap there are several elements that Google will pay particular attention to meaning that the proper and appropriate tags should be provided if you intend for you video to be successfully indexed. The elements that are focused upon when Google is trying to determine your video can be broken down into five main features: Title, Description, Play page, Thumbnail and Player or Content location. It is especially useful to address the last of these requirements and although only either the player or content location is mandatory, including both is highly recommended. Each tag actually contributes significantly to the processing of a video; the player location corresponds to the arguments responsible for playing the video, usually a SWF file, which basically shows Google that the video you have directed it to actually exists on the page, whereas the content is actually the raw bites that make up the video and is used for generating meta data. The type of thumbnail that you choose to represent your content is also an important consideration, for B2B traders for example, publishers may want to be selective in how they promote their company.

There are also three highly recommended optional tags that you may consider including in your sitemap; these are duration, which helps users filter by length of video, expiration which is an important feature in maintaining a successful user experience and a clean index and finally the regional restrict tag which states whether or not video publishers have limited access to certain geographical areas, if Google cannot determine where they can play the content they may not index it.

There are several shortcomings that can hinder the indexing of your video by Google. For example every URL for all the content that it takes to render your page should be accessible to Googlebots, so if your video is hosted by a third party or platform such as Brightcove and the player URL links to that platform you need to tell that platform to un-robot them so that they can be indexed. If you are using a content delivery network to serve your videos (as you may well be) then it needs to be stored on the domain name of the site even if your content is not hosted on it. Google also needs access to all the URLs and so they must be completely susceptible to crawling, the system cannot retrieve files from URLs protected by even basic authentication. Every URL that you submit should also be unique, if you have multiple videos on a single page, Google cannot direct users to different videos if they can’t be reached via different URLs. (This is good practice for general site design)

Finally, it is also important to include video transcripts along with the sitemap. Basically these are short text files describing the content of the video, some people do not see the value in video transcripts but not only do they provide additional SEO (especially with the inclusion of keywords), but some visitors perhaps viewing via smart phones may not be able to access the multimedia, may not be able to listen to the audio or simply may not have time to watch the entire clip.

The significance of VSEO is slowly coming to the fore and it is vital for any SEO enthusiast or practitioner to embrace the importance of video content for search results and as a way of occupying valuable SERP real estate in Google’s universal rankings.

An Introduction to Video SEO is a post from WMpS, your one stop digital agency.

One of the most valuable keynotes for me was by Facebook UK’s commercial director, Stephen Haines. He began by breaking the news that Facebook has hit 30 million active users in the UK – a full half of the population – which means that if you haven’t considered your brand strategy on Facebook, you are missing out on a valuable opportunity. Mr Haines mentioned quite a few strategies for marketing on Facebook, especially using Facebook ads. He highlighted a few statistics that underscore the importance of linking ads to friends. If your target sees an ad that has been ‘liked’ by a friend, the ad results in:

-          68% lift in recall

-          4x increase in conversion

He also said that the fastest growing demographic on Facebook is people over 35, so it’s no longer justifiable to remain off Facebook because your target market is a bit older.

Haines also highlighted a few different ways to use Facebook’s ad system to suit your purposes. We do use these ads ourselves, and are familiar with the tool, but it was still very interesting to hear how others are using the same ads. For example, one company has started distributing samples via Facebook ads, while another company used the very narrow targeting allowed to essentially steal away a rival company’s employees with an ad.

Haines proposed that, because Pages have more ‘likes’ than independent sites have visits, sites will eventually disappear and be integrated with Facebook. This is an observation I simply do not agree with, certainly not the way the internet is structured today; ‘likes’ are spread out over a Facebook page’s lifetime. Monthly visits to a site are a different thing and cannot at all be compared – a more likely comparison would be the number of unique visitors over a site’s lifetime, and I suspect that number would dwarf the Facebook page’s ‘likes’. Both are important, and both are necessary.

A few other useful tips I picked up were in regards to Video SEO. There were two different presentations on the subject and it was great to see these different perspectives on the topic and compare them with my own.

Essentially, optimising your videos for SEO is very important. Videos are up to fifty times (yes, fifty) more likely to show up in the SERPs than a regular text page and they carry the added bonus of a thumbnail, which you can choose, and an interactive element which means they attract nice higher CTRs. If you can show your video on the same page as your site, you’ve just captured more real estate in the SERPs, an important goal for any SEO. The consistent appearance of this particular topic across the presentations just really underscored how important video is. If you’re not fitting it into your SEO strategy, it is definitely time to start.

If you’re interested in what Facebook pages, ads, or videos can do for your online marketing, contact us today!

A Few Insights from TFM&A 2011 is a post from WMpS, your one stop digital agency.

The SEO PowerSuite Toolkit comprises of four tools. These are SEO Spyglass, WebSite Auditor, Rank Tracker, and LinkAssistant. I will cover each of these in turn.

The first tool we picked up was the Rank Tracker. Monitoring ranks is, rather obviously, essential for any SEO, but without a reliable tool, we’re left to scour Google, Bing, and Yahoo for our keywords on our own. Obviously, this is much too time consuming, which is why we use tools to garner this data for us. Because the engines, Google in particular, personalise those results seemingly regardless of whether you’re signed in or not, we needed an impartial tool that could crawl the web on its own. Enter Rank Tracker, which so far has done quite a good job in tracking ranks for a large number of keywords. It has the ability to automatically check ranks at a given time, so setting it to track once every day is ideal; it also allows us to keep track of the historic data, along with graphs and general ranking data. It can also suggest keywords based on not only the Google Adwords data but competitor data among other factors.

The tracker also lets you input your Google Analytics data, so you can track visitors. This is great because it helps give an idea of which keywords actually work once they are ranking and allows us to refine our focus over time. This is of course data we can and have pulled out of analytics ourselves, but having everything in one neat package makes for less time analysing, more time acting, without having to involve more team members.

We have also been using SEO Spyglass. This tool allows you to take a look at your competitors’ backlinks. Of course, this data is also freely available through the search engines themselves, but SEO Spyglass uses a variety of them and packs it all up in an easy-to-manage format, where you can choose which search engine data you’d like analysed alongside the regular link results. You’re able to update the link profiles after they’re saved (which is only available in the paid version) so it’s relatively easy to return and see which links your competitors have gained in the meantime. This is great opportunity to find out whether or not competitors are doing active SEO, what they are working on, and how you can take advantage of their work for your gain. Again, you can do these tasks yourself, but it’s a matter of the time saved by allowing these tools to do the work for you.

WebSite Auditor attempts to measure on-page SEO factors. While it’s useful for quick glancing, this is not quite as useful for the first two after an initial site audit. It does pick out error pages, validation errors, link data, and 301 redirects, as well as a variety of other useful statistics, but so far we have not gleaned anything we didn’t know from this tool. That said, it would be more useful for very large, unwieldly sites, such as ecommerce sites, since you can sort by these errors and broken links to quickly identify problems, and for a starter glance at a site you’re not familiar with. It is less essential for the day-to-day activities of an SEO.

The last tool is LinkAssistant. This uses your site profile to find new link listings and partnerships across the internet. While useful in some instances, we have not yet integrated this into our overall campaigns but are anticipating testing it in the future.

Probably the only downside to these tools is that because of their resource intensive crawling and documenting, they can significantly slow down your PC and make normal work using the internet really difficult. For this reason, I highly recommend scheduling tasks to run overnight or, for shorter scans, during lunchtime. Otherwise, they comprise a great toolkit that we are happy to add to our arsenal.

Review: Link-Assistant PowerSuite SEO Toolkit is a post from WMpS, your one stop digital agency.

1.      Will you genuinely have content to post every day of the year? This is particularly important if you’re running a blog for your business. It’s not particularly good for anyone if you’re forced to come up with irrelevant, useless topics just to keep your blog active. Limit your posting to three days per week or even just one day a week if that’s all you have, and ensure that each and every post is worth reading. Visitors will come back for great posts.

2.      Will your readers be interested if you post so frequently? Not every blog has the type of reader that is eager to consume on a daily basis. In fact, blogs that post more frequently may experience more traffic but have fewer regular readers, simply because people don’t have time to read every post. Clogging up feed readers and Twitter profiles isn’t generally the way to win fans; it’s about determining what is the optimum level of content for both you and your readers and sticking to that, rather than some arbitrary number. Try different amounts of posting and see what works.

3.      Are you blogging for SEO? If so, you probably know that blogging daily is one of the big recommendations for search engine purposes, but you shouldn’t blog solely for this reason. It won’t do you any favours for potential buyers or clients to stumble upon your blog and fail to find something actually useful. Google learns to crawl your site whenever you post new content; if you post daily, Googlebot will learn to visit daily, especially if you are earning links and getting mentions on social networks simultaneously. If you post irregularly, Googlebot will struggle a bit more, and will not be as likely to feature your content in news or blog searches. While posting daily is optimum, it will not harm you at all to post weekly, especially if you are consistent, and will still bring you the benefits of SEO while attracting readers who are interested in your content.

While WordPress’s goal is a nice one to achieve for individuals who may have a substantial amount of free time, businesses should think a bit harder about their goals before jumping on a daily posting bandwagon. This is especially so if your business is small and just one person is posting. If you have a variety of posters commenting on many topics, you will find frequent blogging a vastly easier task.

Should You Post Daily on Your Blog? is a post from WMpS, your one stop digital agency.

The strategy, it is claimed on Google’s official blog, will ensure, “that being bad is, and hopefully will always be, bad for business in Google’s search results.”Although, as Julian Granger points out over at Econsultancy, the article does seem to suggest a key contradiction. In a section hypothetically considering Google’s potential reactions to the issue, we are told that the company does not employ sentiment analysis as part of its web page ranking policy (apart from news and blog searches) and also that the links in the forums which were feeding the beneficial ‘negative SEO’ of the site in question would and should have been no-follow. The problem of executing an automated sentiment based system is that, in the widely used example, entirely subjective topics such as politics and politician’s websites in particular, could unduly suffer because they are unpopular amongst a significant demographic of the opposing public .

So the question that remains is how did this particular organization manage to climb up the rankings to essentially take gold medal position on the internet’s most powerful website? If the links are no follow and sentiment analysis is not a factor then how are the ranks of poorly regarded websites being improved?

Google fellow Amit Singhal stated that many of the links that boosted the disreputable company’s ranking were from established news websites such as New York Times and Bloomberg and that due to the unbiased nature of their composition would not have been affected by sentiment analysis anyway. As he states in the same article though, “in the last few days we developed an algorithmic solution which detects the merchant from the Times article along with hundreds of other merchants that, in our opinion, provide an extremely poor user experience.” An alternate explanation being touted by industry commentators is that the supposed no-follow values which prevent a link from passing page rank are in fact being followed and what is more, indexed by Google page rank.

Are we to believe following Singhal’s statement that Google ranks are in fact being dictated by opinion? It is hard to imagine that any search engine, let alone Google, could effectively employ such a subjectively based system. Singhal concludes the article by confessing that, “We can’t say for sure that no one will ever find a loophole in our ranking algorithms in the future”. Julian Grainger, like the rest of us, managed to come up with at least one unforeseen loophole within about five minutes of it becoming live. What about black hat SEO workers posting fabricated reports lambasting the operations of their clients’ major competitors? This could mean that forums and complaints websites across the internet including Get Satisfaction, ComplaintsBoard and ConsumerAffairs will be saturated with bogus protests in an effort to underhandedly manipulate page ranking.

It would seem that negative SEO is a problem that might be here to stay for a little while longer.

Questions over Google’s reputation (monitoring) is a post from WMpS, your one stop digital agency.

Something in the news recently has highlighted another form of SEO that doesn’t strictly fall into any of the bad SEO categories but arguably shouldn’t be rewarded all the same, is what is being dubbed as “negative SEO”. This is a bit confusing as there is already an SEO activity well documented with this name which is also referred to as Google bowling. This is where the focus of an SEO campaign is put on the competitors rather than the promoted website and work carried out to move them down the serps, leaving it more open for your own website. Negative SEO in the case of this article though is something quite different as I will explain.

The company that has openly highlighted this negative SEO as their SEO strategy of choice is called DecorMyEyes and I will not do them the service of creating a link here, further fuelling their campaign.

DecorMyEyes and the negative SEO campaign

Essentially the company did not plan to carry out the strategy they are now on course with. It happened out of chance from operating a genuinely unscrupulous business model. Basically what the site has done is gain large amounts of links from lots and lots of negative complaints on a range of customer feedback / review websites that contain large levels of domain authority. What is really strange though is the company has not only used this to their advantage in the serps, but also seem to have further developed their business model in order to maximise its potential. This has been done essentially by becoming extremely dishonest and in cases probably illegal when carrying out day to day business dealings.

The owner of DecorMyEyes, Mr  Vitaly Borker actually went as far as to going on some of the customer review websites and incited the customers even more by telling them all their negative feedback was only helping his business even more. Whilst it is extremely frustrating for the customers to here, he sadly is quite right.

The New York times report this story in detail and really is quite an interesting read which I encourage you to take in. What I really wanted to discuss here was how and why this has even worked as an SEO strategy.

Why does negative SEO get you good rankings?

Essentially what Mr Borker was taking advantage of  is phrased perfectly in the NY times piece:

“Google is unable to distinguish between adulatory buzz and scathing critiques when it scours the digital universe and ranks the best and the brightest.”

This is stating in short that to Google, a link is a link and when adding up the amount of links from good quality websites to your own, it doesn’t see whether it is to warn people away or to sing the praises of the site. This is something Google often claim they do carry out in their site ranking algorithm and they refer to it as “sentiment analysis”.

Whether it really is part of their algorithm or not is beside the point as if the algorithm does contain this information, it’s not working and this is shown by the fact searching for many top designer glasses terms brings back decormyeyes on page 1. In many cases the website outranks even the official designer’s website. Whilst this is quite a common feature and something that surprises lots of people, if the official website does not focus its own SEO efforts and have good authority and popularity, why should it rank highly for a competitive term?

What is happening is decormyeyes is optimising its website for designer glasses, it has done some of the normal SEO work legitimately and now it is being supported by a mass negative link baiting campaign which, providing the complaints keep coming in on the negative review sites, will continue to push his rankings up in the future.

But is this right? Why should Google promote a website that is making its money by ripping people off? Well the answer in my opinion is that it’s because people link to it and it’s popular, meaning it is an important website for the chosen search term. When you google a term like “designer glasses” you are not telling Google you want to see companies that are reputable, honest and sell designer glasses for a good price. You are simply saying you want to see the most talked about, popular websites related to that search term which it does.

There are times when this should be changed and that illegal content should be handled properly but this is essentially censorship and should only be carried out when absolutely essential. Instead the answer is that people either learn to refine their search queries to represent what they want to see from a search, in this case “online designer glasses for sale from reputable company” or Google needs to have some filter options to allow you to select from highly rated sites, much like with the business listings / places format.

Does negative SEO work as business strategy?

This is a matter of opinion really as the argument decormyeyes owner Mr Borker uses is that there are plenty of new customers out there and he doesn’t need to focus on the repeat ones. As a large percentage of customers coming in to your website on non brand specific terms are likely to be new anyway, his argument does gain some ground. The main point against this is the cost of a return visitor is much lower and should always be at the core of an online marketing plan. His counter argument is that as his new customers cost him nothing though due to his free negative SEO campaign generated by the people who most want to see him fail, this is not a concern for him.

In the long run, he will come into problems though as the company name is being dragged through the mud which people will start to see and limit any future growth. The potential market open to him also will reduce and reduce until he goes out of business (in theory).

One of the main concerns is that this could take a while to happen, or he could just start the process again under a new company name. Rankings would take a while to establish but it could work. Thankfully shoppers are becoming much more savy and before completing a purchase people will visit review websites or even Google the company name to get some background before handing over their hard earned cash. This is where the negative SEO work seriously falls down here though and due to the authority of some of sites showing these comments, they rank highly for a search on the company name, giving customers easy and quick information that can prevent the purchase being made by doing a quick google search for the company name.

So what is to be learned from this? While in the short term a negative SEO campaign will quite possibly get you rankings for some hard to get terms, it is not a sustainable business model so for any genuine company wanting to be operating in the coming years. Instead we should be looking at the source of the good SEO work (the customer review sites) and focus effort instead on building a large amount of links from happy customers who will pass on their good experiences and deal with the bad customers in a much more effective way.

The strange workings of the search engines! is a post from WMpS, your one stop digital agency.

Google Instant is a service that provides direct listings as the users types their enquiry. The system uses intuitive search results to predict what a user is looking for, so that if someone were to enter ‘flow’ into the Google search bar the algorithms forecast that they would be looking for flowers, but add a ‘c’ to the query and it then expects that they are searching for flowcharts.

The blogosphere is aflutter with talk of the ‘death of SEO’ and a new era in online marketing, but all of this seems a little far fetched. Even Google itself, is not sure about how this change will affect features like its Adwords program.  Although discussions have already arisen about the misleading data that may be a result of the increased Ad impressions registered by Google Analytics. Google Instant essentially has a three second rule, which means that a delay of three seconds or more during a search, something that will probably happen quite often, will produce an ad impression for the results listed at that time.

Others have suggested that Google Instant could have a major influence upon PPC advertising as users will be more likely to click the sponsored link that corroborates with their initial search, rather than continuing to type the full phrase or term. A search for Holiday Inn, for example, which as soon as the word ‘Holiday’ is included, produces suggestions for Holiday Inn, Holiday rentals and Holiday insurance plus a PPC advertisement for Holiday Inn.  If user inclinations can be influenced, and it becomes more likely that they will click the PPC advertisement, it is proposed that this may push up the value of the ads.

Many SEO industry insiders are however, still looking on the bright side of Google’s new innovation. Despite the predictive nature of the service the ultimate search results produced by Instant will not be altered. It may even be argued that the process of attaining high ranking listings for web pages becomes even more crucial and perhaps by utilising alternate keywords than have already been targeted, meaning that SEO work may become even more valuable.

Google Instant is only available to Google Account users who are signed in and make their search from the website’s homepage, as opposed to the quick search in browser navigation bars.

Google Instant- An Instant Headache for SEO? is a post from WMpS, your one stop digital agency.