Many websites(usually start-ups or small businesses) rely on long-tail searches to bring traffic to their websites. This is based upon the difficulty and low conversion rate of short tail phrases. For example lets look at how many results there are for our short-tail and long-tail phrases;

As you can see from our search, our short tail search had 272,000,000 results where our long-tail had 503,000 results. This means there where less pages on the internet competing for that combination of keywords.

With Google Instant many experts are concerned that it will encourage users to settle for the shorter suggested Google searches, rather than creating a more unique targeted search phrase.  Others on the other hand think that it will encourage users to keep typing until the suggestion is more specific to their need, this would cause long-tail searches to increase.

After reading over many of these articles, I think bottom line is; time will tell. As SEO professionals we need to keep a close eye on analytics, continue using best practices and analyze user behavior as this update is surely going to effect the way people search.

The problem I’m having with it, is when I did a search today for “SEO definition” I had a very strange result. The definition Google pulled from it’s dictionary was about how Seo is a common Korean family name, while all 10 organic results where all related to Search Engine Optimization. This seemed unlike Google to give such a answer considering that I’m searching with in the US (so Korean family names might now be the best result for me) and that the remainder of the search results where all about Search Engine Optimization. Keep in mind I also capitalized SEO in my search and performed this search unpersonalized.

Here’s what my results looked like;

It looks like Google may still be working the kinks out of this new feature. But it says something about a search engine when you expect more from them.

Post a comment and let me know your thoughts.

Part of being an SEO professional is keeping up to date with major search engine updates. To keep things simple I’m just going to talk about tracking Google’s algorithm updates. Of course one of the best places to start is the official Google blog. Subscribe to the feed using an RSS reader like Google Reader. I attempt to read through my RSS feeds everyday, prioritizing each feed into specific categories. The official search engine blog sites are the first ones I read everyday then I work my way down my list; advanced SEO blogs, basic SEO news, social media news, webmaster news, etc. This way I get the most important updates (algorithm changes) first.

Follow Respected SEO Professionals

Now that we’re getting updates from Google themselves, we’ll soon find out we can’t rely on them to tell us every little change. At this point you’ll need to learn to also get RSS updates from respected SEO resources like;

• http://mattcuts.com/blog
• http://www.seomoz.org/blog
• http://www.wolf-howl.com

These and other blogs do your homework for you and provide case studies of their results. Reading these blogs will be the third best way to track Google changes using RSS feeds. You’re probably now asking yourself “what was the second best way?” The second best way is to do your own experiments, track your own results and analyze your own experience.

Bookmark The Important Updates

The final step of the process is having a place you can go to to review the most recent Google Updates or even look to the past to reference an older update. This process is something new that I just started doing this month but has already become very valuable to me when working with clients and explaining changes that may effect them. I have been using my favorite bookmarking delicious.com to bookmark the updates that are important. Please feel free to subscribe to this feed for yourself.

Use Collaboration to Make a Larger List

One other suggestion is to work with others to have a shared list of updates. This way you have a greater chance of catching all major algorithm updates. Maybe put one person in charge of tracking Google, another person tracking Bing and a third tracking Yahoo (even though they’ll become Bing soon) and Ask.

Good luck!