By now most of you have heard – and are most likely using Google Instant. I’ve waited to make a post about it, until more data has come in from the labs. I’ve also tried to bypass the hysteria of “SEO is dead” crap .. so let’s cut to the chase and explore Google Instant and what it means to you.

What is Google Instant?

Google will now use their suggestion engine to automatically show you the results below as you are typing.

How do they determine what to show you? (And more importantly, what should a webmaster do?)

Contrary to what was posted immediately after the Instant launch .. you will not need to (or want to) start optimizing for “letters” in Google …

Let’s look …

Let’s break this down as simple as possible …

I’m typing … dog n

You’ll see the results below are NOT for “dog n” … but they are for the 1st suggestion “dog names” and the organic and sponsored links are all for “dog names”.

So what does this mean for SEO targeting?

He are the current takeaways I’m seeing that Google Instant will change in “search behavior”

1. Short Tail is dead — and this is a good thing. Dog is a short tail keyword and previously people would type in Dog, and then go from there, after viewing the search results.  But chances are you aren’t just looking for Dog, when they want something. They want maybe Dog Names, Dog Breeds, Dog Training, Dog Food, etc… and now with Google Instant, they will see these results as they type — and results displayed.  My Theory is that people will naturally over time, will simply keep typing the more appropriate query to what they actually want.

2. Long Tail has changed … With Google Instant pushing people towards the common query, chances are there won’t be a strong need to type in long queries anymore. But and this is a big but ..  The long tail will always be alive for more direct queries. Like local attachments, and specific items. So while strong traffic won’t hit Long Tail anymore — Money traffic will still hit it these words, and maybe more than ever.

3. Medium Tail is king …  3-4-5 Word queries are now the king of SEO. Google instant are pushing the search towards the specific goal search .. which is usually around 3 – 5 words. So if you are looking for next campaign –use this as your base.

On the overall I think this is very good news for webmasters. The short tail was always the hardest to rank for and now in one fail swoop, the 1 word query has been eliminated for the most part. 2 word queries are still a strong play, but only if they 2 words specifically target what a person would want.

As a side note, keyword research has now changed a little. It’s very important that you are targeting the words that come up in the Google Instant search box. If you are targeting the 2-word string, you MUST target every 3 word string that appears, and so on and so on… as such my keyword attack software has been delayed a little bit as I upgrade the keyword system to take this information into account.

CAUTION

This is very important … if you are an Adwords buyer, immediately re-asses your campaigns. If you are targeting 1 word queries (or even some 2 word queries), you are being charged when your ad is displayed with Google Instant. This is a huge potential money waster.

Let me know your thoughts …

If you come to my blog lately you’ll notice that I’ve held off on promoting some of the affiliate offers out there lately.. and frankly I’m seeing a bit of a disturbing trend. People are lying in their salesletters. Now even the person that has been around the scene for atleast a little bit are used to “hype” and unfortunately most times the sizzle is more than the steak. Or in some of the more well meaning situation, the creators at least had high hopes but failed on execution (here’s looking at you CB Predator)

But what I’m seeing lately is newbie launches where people are simply repackaging the same idea, totally inflating the salesletter and selling old ideas. Now when I say old ideas, I don’t mean from 2 years ago – these may actually be helpful. I mean old as in something I just read in another package 2 weeks ago.

Let’s put it to the test… Have you seen a PPV (or “Media Buy”) product lately? How about a CPA system? How about a “Loophole” product? Yeah I thought so.. they are over the place. And guess what? Most of them are all the same.

But what got me today was something else… I got an email from a “guru” about a traffic system that I’d never heard of before that was very controversial, and that he’d give me money if I had.. Wow that sounded interesting. Well guess what? It wasn’t all that interesting. In fact chances are if you’ve ever bought an aged domain, and built a blog and maybe got people to pay you to put links or your site or for a post — then yeah maybe you’ve heard of it before.

I honestly couldn’t believe it… and the scary part is that this came from a pretty well known marketer – somebody that I’ve bought items from before, but I couldn’t believe the hype of this “never heard of before” angle.. it was nothing more than a lie.. yeah that’s harsh but I really don’t care it’s the truth.

Now I’m leaving out the product and the name of the person, because this really isn’t a specific knock on this person or product, but rather a general trend in the industry lately. I honestly think it has to do with the fact that alot of these new marketers are doing 1 of 2 things.

1) They are buying PLR Internet Marketing products, with re-sale rights. So say 4000 people buy the same product as you, and maybe 2% act on it  — that’s a lot of the same product out there, all in different packages.

2) They are using ghost writers or “freelancers”. This one is more open to copycats, because guess where ghost writers and freelancers get their info? Yeah you got it — From the Internet for free, the same place you can.

So my point in all this is this — be very careful what you buy and make sure you get a refund if it doesn’t live up to you thought it would be. If it *does* live up to the hype, then remember the person that did it and follow them closely, because there are really good product/software creators out there (Jon Leger for example). But for the love of Pete, make sure you can afford whatever it is that you “think” you need…

Let me know what you think ….

I just finished reading Chris Rempel’s excellent blog post

Rant: A Simple Formula for Nearly-Instant Results That Doesn’t Cost $60,000

And dare I say It’s recommended reading .. in fact it’s a must read.

Action — this is something that may people and Internet Marketers have trouble with. Often they are always looking for either, “a quicker way” or “a better way”.. Let me tell ya folks – there isn’t one.

Chances are you have all the knowledge you need to succeed – at least a little bit. And then you build off of that success into bigger success. As the old saying goes, the 1st million is the toughest, and there is a valid reasoning behind it.

When you’ve hit that success point ($1million or whatever the goal), you realized a few things.

1 – You’ve made your mistakes and figured out what worked.

2 – You’ve actually taken action to achieve this goal

3 – You have customers now that provide feedback and want more

This my friends is success. Just ask a guy like Frank Kern, who can crack out another product tomorrow and bring in a million smackers.. he’s got all 3 of the above.

So what’s step 1? It’s not “learning” more or “trying to figure out” something. It’s doing something – heck anything is better than hoping and waiting..

Like MJ once said — “just do it”