Google Instant Search doesn’t mean the end of SEO – as some people are claiming. It does make it more complicated. But that should not faze anyone who works in Internet marketing. When we started in 1998 everything was much simpler. Now it is more interesting.

When Google Suggest started it became more important to optimize for the keywords that Google was suggesting. Google was in effect influencing keyword searches by providing suggestions based on others searches.

Get more traffic with Google Instant

Now with Google instant search, this is happening in real time. Therefore if you optimize your site for a keyword fragment you will appear before your competitors.

For example if you wanted to optimize your site for the keyword SEO, you can get your site to show before the competition by optimizing for the word “Sears” as this result appears as soon as S is typed in. Different locations may not show Sears as the first keyword so be sure to localize your searches.

Google Instant Search will influence SEO by showing results for word fragments and the 1st words of keyword phrases

Optimizing for “Sears” may not be easy and it is an open question as to how many people will look down at the results if it is clear that the keyword is not relevant. Usability studies will shed light on this.

However for other searches where the search engine results are on subject and the keyword is easy to optimize for this is a good strategy.

If Google Instant Search is not available in your location you can try Instant Search here.

With the release of Chrome, I automatically started to think about how the new Google web browser will affect search engine optimization. After using it for a few minutes it became obvious.

Chrome has a built in default feature which suggests alternative and refined search terms. For example, when I searched for “Jerusalem Hotels” I got the alternatives shown below.

This search for “Jerusalem Hotels”, illustrates how Chrome will influence the importance of certain search phrases

There are two ways which immediately come to mind that Chrome will influence search:

• Alternative suggestions shown by Chrome will no doubt become more important keywords than in the past since they are now getting extra promotion

• Misspellings of keywords will become less important since Chrome automatically corrects spelling and some people will click on the suggestions

How can  Chrome influence the search space if it has so few users now?

I can think of  2 reasons:

• The number of Chrome users will probably become significant
• This same Chrome feature just became a default on Google search called Google Suggest

After 4 years in Google Labs, my guess is that Google decided to make Google Suggest the default since they had to make sure it worked properly anyway before making it part of Chrome.

It is interesting to compare the feature on Chrome to the Google Suggest feature shown below. Google Suggest has the same first 3 suggestions as the Chrome browser. However it has more suggestions and also shows the number of results available.

Google Suggest has graduated to become part of Google Search

For some reason it doesn’t show the number of results for the original search term typed in by the user. In many cases the number of results is not useful. Does it matter if there are 591,000 results or 367,000 results?

On a local note, it is interesting to  note that even though the Google development team which worked on Google Suggest is located a few minutes from my office in Haifa, Israel, it doesn’t work on the local version — Google.co.il – in Hebrew or English.