As soon as you start typing your query, search results are shown to you right away (even before you press the ‘Enter’ or ‘Search’ button). As you type, the search results change based on whatever you have typed so far. Google tries to be smart and presents you search results based on your search string, location, previous searches and many other parameters.

Here’s Google on Instant Search:

But what should our reaction be – as web writers?

Well here’s my thoughts:

It could be that people will settle for shorter generic searches since Google will start to show useful results straight away.

SEO competition will get even more intense – readers may be even less likely to go below the fold or go to page 2 of the results.

Niche, long-tail searches could be even more frequent as users are almost encouraged to lengthen their search queries as they see that this will show better results.

Is this another Google Wave or Google Buzz? We’ll have to see.

Here’s what Charlie Brooker has to say in his latest Guardian blog:

“It’s the internet on fast-forward, and it’s aggressive – like trying to order from a waiter who keeps finishing your sentences while ramming spoonfuls of what he thinks you want directly into your mouth, so you can’t even enjoy your blancmange without chewing a gobful of black pudding first.”

Post your thoughts in the comments.

The approach usually involve combining search engine optimisation and social media marketing tactics. There are two aspects to this:

1. Social network discovery via search

Useful social content (blog, video, images, audio) that cannot be discovered via search is a lost opportunity to reach an audience that is looking.

2. Ability to attract links for improved SEO

The nature of the social web encourages participation: sharing, voting, commenting and linking. Popular social content gets exposure, traffic and can result in many relevant inbound links.

Social media SEO tips

Find out where your audience is interacting and sharing content.

Over the coming weeks I’ll look at SEO and blogs, Twitter, Delicious, Wikipedia, YouTube and Facebook.

But recently the tool looks like becoming useful for web writers. Until early May the only way to find out what people were ‘tweeting’ about was to go to Monitter or Twitter search. Now you can see instantly what the most frequently used words are right now, just by going to your own Twitter home page.

During the swine flu panic of late April 2009, the most popular topic (known as ‘trending’) was ‘swine flu’. A few weeks later I saw the addition of ‘H1N1′ as a trending topic. So anyone writing articles about swine flu would have been wise to include these two phrases, rather than the European Union’s favourite ‘novel flu’. Hardly anyone used the term ‘novel flu’ in their ‘tweets’, so you can bet that people weren’t typing that phrase into Google.

The main tools we use to find out what terms are ‘hot’, like the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, have a time-lag of over a week. But with Twitter you can see the topical words that people prefer to use straight away – in real time.

Real-time Web

Some have hinted that Twitter may evolve into a search of the ‘now’ – what’s going on right now and what has been published now – about any subject people are interested in. They are currently looking into ways of factoring reputation into Twitter search.

Of course Google looks to fight back. Take a look at the link ‘options’ next time you do a Google search. You can now order by date so the most recently changed pages come up first. Google is apparently set to make lots of other changes so that their results show timely rather than just trusted pages. I’ll kep you posted…

Now Matt is an interesting chap who is worth listening to. He’s head of spam detection, in other words, knows about the tricks that webmasters play on the search engines to get higher rankings.

Here’s some videos that will interest Web writers:

• Does the ordering of heading tags matter?
• Should I tweak my titles and descriptions to improve my CTR (click through rate)?
• Which is more important: content or links?
• Does anchor text carry through 301 redirects?

He’s adding new answers almost every day. Go to Google’s Webmaster Central You Tube channel to see his latest videos.