Well, the big announcement about Google Instant came and went and guess what?   I’m not seeing any real impact in search traffic from sites that I can monitor in Google Analytics (we’re talking about Google Search Traffic only).   I had a nice post on PeekYou yesterday that drove my traffic up – but overall, I’m not yet seeing any real difference from Google Instant this week.  Perhaps over time, as Matt Cutts suggests (see below).

Webmetricsguru.com Google Search Referrals

Google Webmaster Tools -curiously – they don’t have data after September 7th – interesting!

Matt Cutts who is the main Google Evangelist (of Google Search) to the SEO and SEM community weighted in as well about Google Instant (which he probably had a hand in creating).   Others have said the way Google Instant changes how search results display and how we search for them will disrupt SEO - or that SEO’s will have to get a lot more creative. It’s too early to tell that for sure but my guess is we will adapt (and thrive).

I think people are going to get busier who do SEO, not less, up to a point.
After all, at some point if Google makes SEO so difficult no one can figure out how to deliberately optimize (what they want) they may give up “putting their best foot forward, as Matt Cutts mentions in his post which I linked to above.

People are actually more worried about AdWords – but if Google were really thinking that Adwords was going to be all that much affected, they’d probably not have released Google Instant – that’s my guess.  I think Google is not worried about their AdWords revenue being negatively impacted – and I’m sure they tested this internally quite a bit before deciding to roll Instant out.

Others think Google Instant will improve the Long Tail - Hitwise is one of them.

Maybe all of this, Google Instant, Social Media, Social Media Monitoring, etc – Public Relations getting into Social Media, and now Public Relations getting into Search (I’m seeing that) is leading the way toward all of it converging.   In fact Meteor Blog takes a view that Convergence (what I’ve been talking about all along – happened with the Double Rainbow video)

… Given this accelerating trend, SEO best-practices are starting to converge with the activities many of the most savvy social media marketing experts recommend. The best example being that of link building. Quality links are the gold standard in SEO and are also the most coveted links among social media marketing experts. What’s more, the tactics companies use to secure these links look more and more like PR.

Today, good PR firms not only understand their ability to generate quality links on behalf of their clients but also are increasingly sophisticated in their approaches to measuring their impact.

If your PR firm is clueless about SEO and/or social media, it’s time to move on…
What’s coming next on the SEO-Social front is the deployment and utilization of on-site sharing capabilities combined with Open Graph tags. The more marketers can do to enable and accelerate organic sharing and the more they utilize open graph tags to “describe” the contents of the shared content in a standard format, the greater their marketing programs’ impact in terms of both viral spread and SEO.

Of course, what is being mention is the “Micro Format” or Dublin type meta description that Yahoo! and some others have been playing with for a while now – most of the newer semantic markups haven’t yet made their way into marketing, but will, more and more, shortly.

Yes, there be rainbows in our future – and … don’t forget my webinar on Social Media ROI and Rainbow Analytics on September 28th – co-hosted by Compete.com.

Also check out a new tool called Cognician – I am.