Yesterday, Google started rolling out a new feature to help searchers better find what they are looking for — Google Instant. This feature displays your search results as you type, changing the results as you refine what you're searching for.

Some people think that this will make SEO completely obsolete or irrelevant. Steve Rubel's argument is that because no one will be seeing the same results every time, optimizing for those results will be impossible.

Personally, I think that this is just going to force how we optimize pages to change. Google is trying to make it possible for people to find your website without you needing to know SEO. But, as Matt Cutts says in the video on this page, "the same way that you polish your resume, you figure out how to put your best foot forward, SEO tries to figure out how to put the best foot forward for your website." While the end results may change, you still want to put out the best SEO you can so that your website has a better chance than the others.

That doesn't mean that how and what we optimize for isn't going to change. As web designers, we need to always be learning and looking for new ways to improve our sites. The web isn't sitting still, so we shouldn't be either.

Once I got used to it, I started enjoying Google Instant. It gives me new ideas and takes me places I might not have otherwise gone. I'm hoping that that will help me improve my site and help my readers find more to read on my site. I'm not worried that SEO is dead, it's just growing up.

Google Instant Changes Search, But SEO is Still Important originally appeared on About.com Web Design / HTML on Thursday, September 9th, 2010 at 14:19:48.

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