Google Instant Previews: Why good web design matters for SEO

In November 2010, Google launched a featured called Google Instant Previews. This feature allows people a sneak preview of how a website looks like before having to click on it.

While a lot of SEO involves improving the ranking of your website, good SEOs know that the click through percentage is equally important. This can be influenced by your meta title, meta descriptions and how your website looks via Google Instant Preview.

To see this in action, Google your favourite keyword and simply look for the double arrows that appear when you hover your mouse over a search listing. When you click on this listing, you’d find that Google has stored a record of how that webpage looks like. It will even highlight areas of the page which contain the keywords in question.

So what should you do? Firstly, make sure you do a preview of your webpage for your main keywords and compare them to your competitors. This is usually a good indication whether you are potentially positively influencing click-throughs or you’re losing out.

For those of us who need to give our websites a freshening up, it is always a wise decision to vet whether the web developer/designer really knows about SEO. For that, I’d suggest reading some of our other articles!

Finally, for our regular readers, I’d like to make a special request for feedback/requests on any burning questions/topics you’d like to see discussed. Please respond via the comments section or via Twitter @waihonger. As we’ve covered a lot of basic ground on SEO in the last 23 articles, I’d like to cover any aspects I am missing out on before venturing into more advanced SEO strategies.