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Who Are Google Instant’s Golden Winners?

Google’s new Instant real time search has sent massive shock waves through the online SEO and search engine market community. If you’re a webmaster or an online marketer you’re probably checking your stats/traffic/conversion numbers like never before – Google sure knows how to make everyone dance!

None of this would matter if Google wasn’t the most dominant search engine on the planet. Google means traffic, Google means targeted customers, and Google means money in the bank for countless online marketers and webmasters who receive all of the above from the little search engine that roared.

What is really frightening, Google almost has a monopoly on the online search market, especially now with Yahoo being powered by Bing. Webmasters and marketers can now only rely on two search engines to supply their search traffic.

While there are numerous sources of viable traffic on the web outside of the search engines… many marketers already have the majority of their online marketing geared to the search engines, especially Google.

Most of these same marketers were instantly worried (some say horrified) how Google’s new real time search would impact their marketing, especially their long-tail keywords which bring in most of the sales?

While the jury is still out on that one, other issues are popping up regarding “paid listings” and how it is now more dominant in search results, pushing the free organic listings down further and sometimes pushing them out of the fold.

Even with the arrow keys now coming into play, many searchers are just too lazy to scroll and will just click the first visible listings.

Perhaps even more important are the results which pop-up when you first start typing in your search query. These are really the golden winners in Google’s Instant Search. Having your site or company listed when a searcher types the first letter – has to be a real traffic bonanza.

Now these results vary from country to country, the results showing for the United States are slightly different from those showing for Canada.

Again, Google is showing why it is the top search engine in the world – the Canadian results are well matched with NHL, Canadian Tire, BMO, Rogers, Via Rail… all showing up.

Google Buzz

Everyone has been ‘buzzing’ around the new social media platform launched by Google recently – Google Buzz. There is nothing outstanding about the layout – it’s a sort of Twitter meets FriendFeed design. The major difference (and advantage) Buzz has over the existent social networks is that it is integrated into your Gmail account. There are many other interesting features which have been discussed in much detail across the internet, hence in this article I will just concentrate on SEO implications of Google Buzz.

For Search Engine Optimizers, the two interesting aspects of Google Buzz are:

  1. The ‘implicit’ priority that Google Buzz will get on the Google Search Engine
  2. The ‘auto-following’ – you can leverage Gmail to grow your social network more rapidly (compared with Twitter) since Buzz has a built-in viral feature by auto-following contacts

For the past few years, Google has moving towards a trend know as ‘real-time’ or ‘blended’ search. On your search result page you won’t only see organic (free results) and sponsored ads but also images, video, Twitter, MySpace and news posts (all as it happens). The opportunities for SEO here are:

  1. Google may interpret links from these posts to your website as having some marginal impact on your PageRank.
  2. People may read your tweets, news posts and thereby directly o to your website
  3. The posts themselves may show up on Google searches and give you some temporary visibility for free and for your target keywords.

I may be speculating here but I believe that Google Buzz might get a slight advantage when it comes to ‘real-time’ search, after all its Google’s baby.

Or look at it this way – Google is in all ways the dominating Search Engine – a huge monopoly, huge profits to link products to attractive packages and important products to give away for free. Buzz is already linked to Gmail and Google says that public Buzz will be indexed on Google search engines (have a look at the launch video). Google is also indexing Twitter posts; all of this encourages an SEO to see Buzz as a powerful tool.

Also take a look at YouTube, video posts on Google are heavily biased towards it with respect to other alternative video services. Not really sure if Buzz will outrank Twitter but there is a vast opportunity to be exploited from an SEO perspective.

Another important point is that you can get a real link from Google.com Many SEO people still like to get links, especially from an authority domain. All your buzzes are extra pages with their own clean URL. The links don’t use the infamous no-follow attribute that makes them useless for search engines.

I believe Google Buzz has a vast opportunity that can be exploited by search engine optimizers. So buzz your way around!

The author of this article represents a popular social networking website design and social networking web development company. It is also dedicated towards offering design and development solutions such as web 2.0 development and web 2.0 design company.