Google Instant Previews, which was recently unveiled, gives users the ability to see a website before they visit it. Google accomplishes this by taking a screenshot of every webpage in its index and giving users access to it with a magnifying glass icon positioned to the right of every search result. When a user clicks or hovers over the magnifying glass of the search result, a mini-preview of the webpage will appear beside the search result. It features a quick view of the website’s content without having to visit the webpage.
This new technology will dramatically change SEO, but not in the sense of search engine rankings or how your website is optimized. This will change the behavior of a user’s decision to visit your website based on your site’s first impression. This is either good news or bad news for some companies and highlights the importance of a good web designer. For 3wiredesigns.com, an Interactive Media Agency based in Little Rock, Arkansas specializing in both webdesign and SEO, this is the best of both worlds. In the past, web developers and designers would sometimes have to sacrifice good design for the sake of packing it full of rich content, keywords, tags, anchors, and other SEO methodologies. Many websites would make it to the top of search results, but would have 100% bounce rates due to the abundant text-overload and lack of visual aesthetics.
Some Flash websites may be negatively affected by this new feature, because snapshots taken from Flash-based sites within Google appear to show only banners and text within the preview and does not showcase the entire website. This can prove to be an issue if the main focus of your website is flash content. The search preview will just show pieces of your website unless this feature is revised.
The key feature of Instant Previews is that Google will highlight the section of the page where the search term occurs. Imagine you are researching information on healthy eating and you receive thousands of results for your search string. Instead of having to click on every result and hunt for the keyword in question to see what the article says, you can glance at Instant Preview and see the article in just a matter of seconds.
Web designers are just as important or maybe in some cases, more important than SEO experts with the arrival of this new feature. Companies need to take design and layout just as serious as SEO when developing a websites. A highly ranked website may now receive less traffic or higher click-through rate’s (CTR) compared to a better looking website 2-3 results below it.
