Search engine Marketing - Google tries out full-page previews

After its short and controversial foray into real-time search - which drew equal amounts of praise and scorn from the search engine marketing sector - Google has unleashed a new technology on the unsuspecting online community.
This time, Google is trialing full-page previews enabling users - you guessed it - to preview web pages in full before clicking on a search engine results page link.
The latest development seems like a fairly logical step for the company after its introduction of Google Instant - the aforementioned real-time search results technology. But whether it will catch on is still open to discussion. It seems like the search engine market is getting ever more saturated with 'exciting new features', but the demand on bandwidth and the increasing number of under-mouse pop-ups drives many users to distraction.
When it comes to the search engine optimisation side of things, however, businesses need to take a long-term and objective view of what is happening to the major search engines.
Under the hood, it is unlikely that Google will have changed very much, but the impact that the development could have on user behaviour could have a major influence on search engine marketing.
Patrick Altoft, a writer for BlogStorm, summed it up by saying: "There is no guarantee that this feature will ever attains a wide release.
"Nonetheless, the feature will certainly prove useful in discerning what sites are worth visiting."
Up until relatively recently, Google's algorithms have paid very little attention to the aesthetic qualities of website optimisation strategies. But if discerning search engine users start avoiding messy websites because they are cluttered and unusable, then their rankings are likely to suffer.
It will also make it ever more important for search engine marketing campaigns to point to landing pages that contain as much relevant information as possible - preferably in an easily readable format.
Web users will need to be able to glance at a site and instantly decide whether it is relevant, which means keywords will no longer be the be all and end all.
That is, of course, if Google's latest instant-preview technology is accepted by internet users, which is by no means a certainty.

Mediarun is a search engine marketing company in London providing search engine optimisation, pay per click advertising and social media services to clients with quality traffic.