Google recently announced that the new look they’ve been testing since last year was rolled out to everyone. There’s a new mobile look too. And there’s one important thing you as a business owner should know about what most are announcing as a change to the Google search engine results pages.

It’s not just a facelift.

The New Google has implemented fundamental yet subtle shifts that they’ve been making over the past few years, including features from successful beta testing they did.

This can affect your business in one of two ways. Either you can lose traffic to competitors who may not even know what they’re doing right to get extra traffic, or you can educate yourself about what’s different, then position yourself to take advantage of the changes.

In case you don’t know my philosophy about getting better exposure and rankings in search, here it is in a nutshell: work with the search engines, not against them. Instead of trying to cheat with spammy methods that don’t provide any real benefit to people who may find your content, find out what the search engines need most and provide it.

Therefore, these tips aren’t going to include anything black hat or prohibited in any way by Google.

1- Fill out your Google profile.
http://www.google.com/profiles

At first glance, this probably seems like a strange thing to suggest. But your profile in Google is increasing in importance. I’m not claiming that this is a ranking factor, not at all. However, it can help you get additional exposure and not just through Google Buzz.

Google Social Search, also a Google Labs graduate, is live in the main Google search when you’re logged in to Google. When you fill out your Google profile and include links to your site, your YouTube account, Twitter account, etc., you will begin to get suggestions Google has found from the relevant content of friends and acquaintances you’re connected to online through social media, and vice-versa.

That means a site you referenced in your Google profile can appear at the bottom of the first page of results for a logged in user of Google. Not necessarily a huge bump if you have a small network, but not a bad bit of free traffic in exchange for a few minutes of work.

2- Sign up for Google Places – even if you’re an entrepreneur or micro-business.

http://www.google.com/local/add/

Google Local results have been showing up in Google results for some time now, but with the revamped Google Local Business Center, now renamed Google Places, have come some important enhancements that are smoothly integrated in the new Google.

Not only that, the new version includes not just basic information such as location and phone number, but photos, audio, video, coupons, real-time updates, even Product Listings.

There’s not enough space here to detail all the great new things you can add to enhance your business presence for free on Google, but even if it didn’t help you show up properly under the “Maps” or “Nearby” section of relevant searches in Google, it would be worth it.

Extra tip: No matter what size your business, as long as you have a location with a street address outside your home, it is likely worth adding to Google Places. Do some keyword research and try out your search in Google to see if the free listing would be worthwhile.

3- Re-purpose content you already have to fit into more spots in the New Google.

In past years, perhaps it made sense to focus most of your efforts on the text-based version of Google search. After all, not all searchers are savvy, and most of the focus at the time was placed on the main Google web search.

Fast-forward to the age of dynamic information, with images, blogs, status updates, podcasts, videos, RSS and Atom feeds. Now there are all kinds of ways you may be discovered in search, and many of them may not even be on your site.

Take video for example. Even the camera-shy can benefit from the easier, faster rankings videos often get in Google by using video screen capture, animations or slideshow presentations converted to video.

Take that article you wrote, turn it into a PowerPoint presentation, set it to music, or better yet, narrate a presentation. Then publish it as a video, pop it on a few video sites, add it to your podcasts, and track your traffic. You may see a measurable difference in traffic or rankings that’s worth the extra bit of work.

Participate in some Q and A sites and get your answers ranked under discussions.

Write a blog post or submit a press release to get a ranking in the News or Blogs section. The more content you have available in more formats, the higher your chances of discovery.

4- Make sure you’re aware of every opportunity to get on the first page or rank number one.

While you’re re-purposing content to show up under the other menu sections in the new Google search results pages, consider this: there are now a multitude of ways to get ranked on the first page in Google, and they vary from listing to listing.

Sometimes the top ranked content is a video. Others don’t have video at all, but they do have the latest tweets scrolling on the first page.

Sometimes an image would help – it may not be the top ranking, but on the search results page it’s the easiest one to get. Other times it may be a news story, or a well-linked blog post. Pull up the terms you want to rank for in Google and see what the top content is.

Evaluate your competition and see what you could do better – or how you could buy prime advertising spots on their web site- not every keyword competitor is a market competitor. Some sites offer content instead of products, in hopes of getting business people like you to advertise.

Next time you’re at Google, do a quick search on your name, your favorite hobby, and the keywords you want your business to rank for – you may or may not like the new look to the results page in Google.

Just remember that the real issue isn’t whether you find the new Google style aesthetically pleasing – it’s how you can make these changes in Google benefit you.

For many of you keyword research veterans, this may be nothing new. And if you’ve signed up to get the free gifts, you also have my free Lucrative keyword research Guide. However, I find this to be the best mini-guide to Keyword Research that I’ve seen in a while. It covers quite a few things that even experts forget.

Here’s a quote from Gobala Krishnan’s article Keyword Research 101 : Fundamental Keyword Strategy that talks about the limits of keyword research:

There are some severe limitations to keyword research. The main one is that it tells you what the user typed into the search engine, not what the user is really looking for or the state of mind the user is in.For example, the user typed in “cheap gibson electric guitar” into the search engine and found your site. But, what is the user thinking when he is reading you page? Is he:

* Looking to buy a product – if yes, then your site should be primarily monetized by affiliate programs that pay you per sale. You can find a lot of physical products and digital products that you can sell from your website just by typing in “your keyword affiliate program” in search engines
* Looking for more information – if yes, then your site should be monetized by an advertising program like Google Adsense or Chitika, since the user is more likely to click away for more information rather than buy something
* Looking for bargains – if yes, your site should be monetized by Ebay or Auction Ads, which is based on Ebay but works like Adsense
* Looking for freebies – if yes, your site should be monetized with CPA (Cost Per Action) programs that you can find on networks like www.shareasale.com or www.linkshare.com

Awesome approach to a concept that is often a little tricky to relay.

Increase Traffic to Your Blog from Search Engines

Your favorite thing about having a blog may soon be this – they naturally attract search engine traffic.

Some people are reluctant to optimize their blogs, in the desire to please visitors over search engines, and rightly so. You don’t want to have a blog purely for the purpose of attracting more search engine traffic. This doesn’t change the fact that you can do both, with a few simple changes to your blog.

I don’t know about you, but one thing I’m occasionally guilty of forgetting is that the queries we find in our web stats don’t represent faceless, mindless data – they represent people who have found what they were looking for, in the form of your site.

So one could argue that you are serving your audience better when you take the time to research what they want to read about and deliver it. After all, if they searched, and found you, the best way to keep them there is to give them more information on what they searched about, right?

Blogs already have optimized site architecture. Most are set up with a clear navigation, where every page is set up to link back to the other main pages.

They also have the inherent potential to be well-linked. If you haven’t already submitted to blog directories, you are missing out on some great one-way links. Many of the top directories can be found on Robin Good’s Top 55 list at MasterNewMedia.org – now up to 90 blog search engines and directories.

But before you head over there and start submitting, you should know how to optimize your blog. Then those listings can help your site get the best keyword placement in the major search engines.

Here are five tips to help you get your blog to show up at the top of more lucrative searches, more often.

Lucrative Blog SEO Tip #1: Lucrative Keyword Choices

You have a choice. You can target a general keyword you have little chance of ranking well for and get barely any traffic.

Or you can shoot for a keyword that gets a moderate level of targeted traffic resulting in more subscribers and sales. I like to call them a name I heard recently in passing – “lucrative keywords”, though they are more often called “profitable keywords”.

Whatever you call them, here’s the most important thing: They may not get you the most traffic, but they do bring the most profit.

You may be surprised to know that most of the time there isn’t a direct correlation between high traffic and high sales. Many of the most profitable sites in the world only get a moderate amount of traffic – and due to their choices of lucrative keywords, they have a much higher ratio of visitors to buyers.

A recent article in Information Week stated that the highest conversion rates from search engine traffic comes from people who do four word queries.

The great thing about your blog is that it can get so well-indexed that you have the potential to show up for any number of four word phrases that are relevant to your industry.

It isn’t just the four word phrases that get converting traffic, though I’d agree that they result in the highest conversion of buyers.

Targeting your blog discussion to a two or three word phrase that has a high yield of traffic, and yet has little competition is not a dream of past Internet days. Another recent study revealed that a surprisingly high percentages of queries made in search engines have never been performed before this past year.

As long as there are new developments, new products, services and trends, there will never be a shortage of these types of terms, if you know how to discover them.

Lucrative Blog SEO Tip #2: Keyword Placement

Your blog can be set up to repeat the keywords that you want to target just enough times to establish a theme. You can take full advantage of this in your post titles, your category names, the way you pages are named, and even with Technorati tags and your permanent links that appear after each post.

Lucrative Blog SEO Tip #3: Timely Posting

Instead of pinging at 15 minute intervals when your site hasn’t been updated, or even pinging after every single post, you can actually get better results if you update during one of three sweet spots in the day. Here’s one that you can use today.

Check your web site statistics. If you’re getting spidered every two weeks or even monthly, you can increase your number of spider visits by blogging on the anniversary of the period that the spider comes to your site. It takes a bit of monitoring, but you can often predict when the anniversary date of your last spider visit was.

An even faster way is to ping at a time when the spider is reading a page that carries your update. (This is a little harder to explain, as I’ve mentioned, but I have a resource that explains this process in-depth.)

Lucrative Blog SEO Tip #4: Get Linked

Turn on your site feed(s) and use them to promote your blog. Robin Good’s guide can get you some great one way links. If you sparingly include the lucrative keyword you selected in tip two in your title and description, all those link backs will contain the keyword term you most want attention for, which is often noted by the spiders as they follow the link through to your site.

Once there, if you use these and other tips to skew your blog a little more to the search-engine-friendly side, the synergistic effect is better, more profitable traffic.

Lucrative Blog SEO Tip #4: Frequent Updates

The more you post, the more food for the spider, which can cause the spider to react by splitting up its job into several visits, whereupon you have even more content, and so on, until the spider just adds you to a more frequent schedule of returns.

For example, I get spidered several times daily by Google, and yet I can go a week without an update with no change in spider visits. This means my pages get indexed more often and my new pages show up faster. Think of what that could do for the launch of your next product.

You’ll be happy to know that you don’t have to slave over long blog posts several times a day, all day long to get similar results from your blog. In fact, some blog software will let you set up your posts in advance, so that you can have posts show up daily even though you technically only blog once a month.

Bottom line: A few small changes to your blog can draw more search engine traffic without turning off your blog visitors. Done properly, this gives your audience more of what they were searching for in the first place.

Confused about which keywords to choose? Try the 100% free Lucrative keyword research Tutorial. See also my free reference guide to blog Related Posts at this site.

Anyone can tell you that writing articles will help your search engine traffic if you do it correctly. It’s an easy concept to grasp, provided you have people to explain it to you properly. Personally, I only put my minor keywords in articles that are on other people’s sites – my major keywords are on the pages that the search engines land on.

With the method I’m about to show you, which is similar to the garden path method I showed you earlier, you’ll get an overview of the methods I use to get traffic that buys from my articles and artilcle series.

Back with step one in a few minutes.