COMMENTS
cool. I tried it this AM but I couldn't find the magnifying glass. Is it a preference that you have to turn on in your browser?
These are great tips. If you don't see the magnifying glass, just go to Google and at the bottom it will have the line: "New! Peek at the pages in your search results with Instant Previews"
You can click on that to allow you to see that magnifying glass.
It's pretty cool.
One last tip - get rid of pop-ups, because they make your page difficult, if not impossible, to see.
wow that's interesting, after doing a few searches and trying it out I found myself looking at previews further down. Sites that are further down the search results may see more actions if there site visuals are more effective than that of the higher ranked pages. Thanks for the news.
I checked this out last week after reading an article on Website Magazine site on this. Yes, these are not only the best SEO steps to look at for Google Instant, but in general too.
Excellent tips. Glad you're ON IT!
This is a good change and it's obviously a reaction to Bing, which has been doing something similar for months now.
On some listings, a small box comes up with a summary of the page content. Do you know how Google is generating this info?
Nice tips mate.
I would like to add few:
Getting ride of IFrames would also be useful similar to flash.
This should also make people put important on deeper pages.
The design change would be useful to make sure product is just one click away
Thanks for the tips. It would be great if Google would let us some how serve up an optimized landing page of sorts for the preview instead of just a preview of the site.
@Gloria This is probably a reaction to Bing! but at the end of the day it is in their best interest to serve the most relevant search results, and this is just another step in that direction.
@Saurav These are great tips as well. Thanks for sharing them with the community.
I also hate flash on websites when its used for superfluous reasons. Things like headers and navigation don't need to be in flash.
Video, on the other hand, is extremely important. Google needs to work on rendering flash, if anything, for videos embedded on web pages, YouTube, Vimeo and all the other video sites out there.
I agree with Chris Crawford in that visuals and overall site design are going to become much more important in order to grab the attention and get the clicks.
@Dan Tyre. You actually
do not need to click on the magnifying glass in all browsers. You can click anywhere in the 'row', other than on the link to the site, within Chrome/Safari and while hovering a result in FF I see the magnifying glass light up (not hovering over the magnifying glass), nothing is happening (Mac). Opera doesn't appear to support it at all and at the moment I cannot speak to IE.
Do you find that searchers actually use the preview button? I didn't even know it was there. It seems that having that feature would reduce click-through rates. Now catchy designs are even more important.
Glad to stumle upon reading your blog post today! When we redeveloped our website I thought our header was too large and have continuously thought about changing it. My previous error has now turned to a benefit thanks to google. We do have a flash header (we really like it), but we don't rely on it for SEO. Also thankful that it doesn't make our site look to funny in the preview. Deep sigh of relief.
Kristen Sonsma
Chief Business Development Officer
www.bsquareclothing.com
Be sure to 'Like' us at
www.facebook.com/bsquareclothing @bsquareclothing
I don't think people are going to use the preview button... As the user has to try and click on a tiny little button to get it to load. It's much easier to simply click to the site itself. Unless they make it an autoload feature. Ie you hover over the hyper link and it displays the preview it's going to add zero value.
Hi,
Great comments. I have been searching Google Australia and no magnifying glasses come up for users to view the Instant Preview. Does anyone know why?
Thanks for the timely pointers! I'm going to be doing some updating of my sites to optimize them better for this new tool.
Hi i need help getting customers for my website do you have any information please.
i also need to have some tips regarding how to attract traffic to my website. kindly help.
I agree with all the good points of the article but shouldn't that be your SEO best practice anyway if you really want to extend your online reach and optimise your audience conversion?
@Horace You should sign up for one of our inbound marketing assessments http://www.hubspot.com/inbound-marketing-assessment-product/
@Rasculous That is a good point. A lot of people make a big deal about how changes to the search engines are going to change internet marketing completely. What I am trying to show is that in the end if you are following good solid SEO best practices then you will have set yourself up for success, even in the changing search environment.
Great suggestions to keep on top of ever-changing search engines. While I was not able to see the "preview" on Google, I noticed Bing has been doing this for a while and have been playing around with our site to produce a decent looking preview.
You don't need a huge header because Google has a little cutout that highlights your search term. True you can't read the whole site, but you'll be able to tell if the site is relevant.
I've seen some comments that say people won't click on the little magnifying glass, if you've tried this feature, then you'll know you don't have to click on the icon, anywhere other than the link will turn the feature on for the whole page, so you can just drag your mouse over any search and see the preview. It takes less then 1/10 of a second to click it.
Hello Eric,
Did not even notice the preview was there. Interesting feature.
Yet another thing web designes have to worry about.
How is your website going to look in IE, Firefox, iPad, phones, how much more, and now google instant.
Andrew
Can anyone tell me why the dialogue box comes up on the instant preview for some sites but not for others.
I love it! We've been explaining to clients that Flash video isn't search engine friendly but now they can "see" that Flash doesn't register with Google in another way.