This is a guest post from Webprofits.com and is part of SMSEO’s continuing effort to form relationships with other content providers and provide a platform for exposure for online business.
Every now and then Google comes up with something so useful that it’s quite impossible to call it a gimmick. Google Instant was a case in point, and Google Search Preview is likely to be another. The Search Preview is represented by a magnifying glass icon. Click this and you get a snapshot of the site, including highlighting your text. This could be a new frontier for SEO, as well as drastically improving the market for good web design.
One thing that’s notable about Google’s various innovations is that they’re invariably based on tried and true platform technologies. The Google Search Preview is a good natural development of some existing technology, including flip through style windows you can find on various news sites related to searches.
The SEO Angle
The difference is that it’s also about a thousand times more efficient for users than the existing system for searching. Anyone who’s ever really suffered during a search would agree. It looks good, and more to the point, it’s extremely useful.
This is where search engine optimization will really live up to its name, too. Search Preview is a click function, and potentially a mouseover function, unless that’s too messy, but it’s also an instant decision maker for searchers. It will progressively revolutionize SEO and online marketing as it develops. SEO can benefit a lot from this sort of instant visual support. This search shows site content, and it’s valuable content to the user, adding to the search value, and improving the SEO outcomes.
The Web Design Angle
Search Preview is likely to also create a demand for very strong web design values. Web design in this context is also a direct impact on searchers. That means home pages will need to look great, all the time. What happens to all those Flash intros is debatable, because the inference at this stage is that the page only is displayed, not the cosmetic effects.
So the design process is basically back to pages, visual impacts, and above all strong site content, displayed on those pages. That’s likely to cause quite a flurry of reinvention and innovation among designers, even form designers, because a bland looking page, however functional, isn’t going have a lot of impact in this environment.
The good news is that all that page clutter will be on the way out, too. The “classifieds” style web page will have almost zero impact as a preview. It’s a longstanding principle of visual design that clear imagery and strong focus will beat clutter any day, and this is likely to be another case in point. Pages like that are messy, and the average net user’s response to clutter is pretty negative at the best of times. Add SEO and content presentation values, and the result has to be upgraded presentation, to get noticed.
The Content Issues
With all this visual impact will have to come strong content. Web content writers will need to become hybrid copy writers, to take advantage of the previews effectively. Headers and openers will need to be good, strong copy. These previews make banners a lot more relevant than they are now, and the yes/no decisions on page content will be critical.
Whatever happens, it definitely won’t be dull. With any luck, Google may have found a way of taking the whole internet up another gear.