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The question "Will Google Instant Kill SEO?" is about the funniest thing I've heard in days.
Every time Google makes a change people panic over how it will affect the way we market websites - which is natural. But is Google's new ajax search function really going to destroy the SEO industry?
Hardly.
Think about it - no matter how the results are delivered visually to searchers, Google still needs to crawl, understand, index and rank websites and SEO is about making sure that web pages can be understood by Google.
Will we have to alter what we do over time?
Yes. Probably. But that would happen anyway as search algorithms change and get better.
How do I, personally, see this affecting things? Well, it will be more important than ever to make sure you map your keywords correctly from generic terms at top level to very long tail as you get further into the site. You'll also need to ensure your inner pages are indexed - as having the most relevant page displayed at all times will become increasingly important.
So if, say, you sell televisions, then you'd want your home page ranking for "televisions", a top level category page ranking for "lcd televisions", a subcategory page for "sony televisions" or "32 inch lcd televisions" and a product page showing for a product search. The only difference here is that if we've managed this well then the right page will show as the searcher types - not after they've hit 'enter'.
Sure, we'll need to make sure each page is correctly targeted and that we cover all bases in terms of what searchers might type in - but we've always had to do that.
Yes, compelling titles and meta descriptions will be important in capturing the searcher's attention - but that's always been the case.
OK, we may start to see fewer visits from very long tail keywords - but we also may see more. It's impossible to determine how this will impact searcher behavior, but in terms of SEO, we've still got to do what we've always done - make web pages easy for search engines to understand.
