In the last couple weeks we’ve seen the introduction of Google Instant results and subsequently a heap of excited blog posts about the impact it will have on improve your rankings. As often happens, the news became a trending topic on the media industry-heavy Twitter, and the impact of Google Instant on people who actually use Google for something other than their job was slightly lost in the noise.

Early results suggest it hasn’t actually changed anything to improve your rankings on a large degree. I’ll stick my neck on the line (hey, why not?) and bet that it will have disappeared by February 2011.

Google Instant: Does It  Improve Your Rankings

While the impact of Google Instant is interesting for SEOs, there are plenty of other interesting strategies to discuss that can actually have an “instant” impact to improve your rankings. Today.

How about a website ranking number one for [car insurance] with only four links pointing to it with “car insurance” as the anchor text? Pretty interesting, right? For such a competitive keyword you might expect somewhat more volume than this, out of a total number of inbound links less than any other site on the first page…

Last time, we discussed why you shouldn’t be afraid of URL links, and why they’re actually more likely to suggest a natural link profile. There have also been some other more detailed posts looking further into this and so it wasn’t much of a surprise seeing that a number of sites with very spammy-looking backlink profiles were penalized — it’s not like Google hasn’t been warning people about this for a while.

Right now we have instances of clients who are well-known within their markets — good websites providing useful content — but they aren’t ranking precisely because they have too many site-wide links, too many links that are dofollow, and too many contextual links will not improve your rankings.

By “too many,” I mean as a percentage of overall links, all adding up to a link profile that is completely unnatural. Will  improve your rankings by actively removing links, and the only links coming in are branded, URL links from highly relevant sites.

SEO: Improve Your Rankings

The challenge to improve  your rankings poses for some SEO agencies is that they have got their approach to link building so ingrained that they haven’t spotted some of these trends. Instead, they put more effort into building the wrong kind of links, making the situation worse for their clients.

This means that SEOs and agencies need to consider not just how to build quality links for clients but how to actively manage the link profile and ensure that the right links are being built.

For some, this will mean the normal contextual links, derivatives of them, and a few branded, long tail and URL links as well. For others, it will be weeding out site-wide contextual links, replacing them with higher quality branded and URL links, and even building some nofollowed links from social media and PR sites to improve your rankings.