Content is king. It’s true that link building and on-page optimization tactics can help you get more out of your content. But you need to be involved in multiple content channels to maximize your organic traffic. Here are 8 steps you can take right away to enhance your chances of getting more traffic from Google:

• Add your Blog to Google News: if you have a multi-author blog and provide information to your visitors on a daily basis, there is no reason not to add your blog to Google News.
• Optimize Your Images: a lot of “gurus” have been using this tactic to generate some extra traffic on the side. Don’t just use free images you can find online. Take some of your own, optimize them properly, and give them descriptive names.
• Upload Your Videos: if you have not taken time to upload your videos to video sharing sites, now’s the time. Use the right keywords and tag your videos properly to maximize your opportunity.
• Add Your business: don’t forget to add your business to Google and get yourself on Google Maps. If you have a local business, there is no reason not to. 
• Start a Blog: if you have an online portal which you don’t update too frequently, you should put some effort into starting a blog next to it. That way you can show up in Google’s Blog search results too.
• Upload Your Book: if you happen to have written an e-book, there is no reason you should not upload it to Google (unless the numbers don’t work for you). Gives you yet another opportunity to get traffic from Google.
• Forums Still Matter: forums and discussion boards still matter. They may be based on an old technology, but they can provide you with backlinks and some coverage from Google.
• Take Advantage of Google Products: if you sell products online, you can bring more visitors to your website by getting listed on Google Products.

This is just a high level overview of the opportunities Google’s new interface provides to publishers. The X’s and O’s of search engine optimization still applies to each step. So don’t go overboard and forget about spamming the SERPs.

Google Trends is one of the most underrated services offered by Google. Smart marketers have been using it to optimize their pages, get more traffic on a daily basis, and even come up with products that people want to buy. But it’s still surprising to see executives and top marketers have no clue about what Google Trends is all about. Till now, you could access Google Trends through its official page. But Google has just announced that you can now see the trends on the SERPs, as long as the keyword phrase that you are searching for is on the top 100 fastest rising terms, based on the data from GTrends. Here is what Google had to say about it:

hen you search Google.com and your query matches one of the top 100 fastest-rising search terms, we’ll show you a graph at the bottom of page, with more information — like how popular the query is, how fast it’s rising over time, and other useful data.

I still would have wanted to see the top 100 fastest-rising search terms on GTrends’ page, but that is not a big change. The move should certainly make it easier for people to get more out of their search process. And one would hope that more people will now take advantage of Google Trends, now that the trends will be shown on the search results page.

How it works

To see the feature in action, you will have to check Google Trends and choose one of the top terms on that list. “Joe Scarborough Surgery” is a keyword phrase that is going strong as I am writing this post.

As you can see, Google Trends information shows up at the bottom of the page. While this is very interesting, I would hope for Google to show the same information when I searched for “Joe Scarborough” as well. Google has a lot of services that could provide useful information to the searchers, but not everyone is going to search for “Joe Scarborough Surgery.” I mean what are the chances. Google needs to find a way to tie the information together and provide more value to searchers per each and every search. To cut the story short, it would have been nice if Google would show people who are searching for a specific term the related trends as well.

All in all, it’s admirable that Google is trying hard to make the search process more convenient for searchers and provide them with more useful information per search. But there is just so much data out there and somebody needs to tie them together. The service that manages to do that in the most effective fashion possible will win the “search wars.”

So now you know what you need to do to get ranked high on Google. You want to be involved on forums. You want to review products on a consistent basis. You want to make your own videos. Adding images and posting on a consistent basis is going to matter as well! And who can forget about the social media.

There are 2 cool, interesting features with Google options. You can use Wonder Wheel to find related searches and visualize them:

Timeline is essentially a time visualization tool that lets you find out who’s been talking about your keyword phrase in the past years. A cool way to do some trend analysis as well:

So what does this all mean for marketers? Search engine optimization is going to change forever in the next few years. You’ll have to be more involved and pursue a multi-channel content strategy to get the best from Google. Google will still find your web pages, but if you are not creating video or contributing on Twitter, Facebook, or Friendfeed, you are leaving traffic on the table. The jury’s still out on Google Search Options, but we can see where the industry’s going. The days of writing text and hoping for lots of traffic are finally over, and “content is King” is going to have a whole new meaning.

Your take: is Google Search Options a game changer for SEOs?

Guess what? It’s not! I have seen sites that have a 6 year contract and are parked using Adsense for Domains or Sedo. That doesn’t sound like providing value to visitors. This is one of the myths that have been circulated by fake SEO consultants to justify those big pay checks (believe me, there are crazier so-called “ranking factors” out there). Google does care about you providing the best experience to its users, but it is not going to penalize you if you decide not to commit to a long-term contract for your domain. A lot of folks claim these things without properly testing them out (Testing doesn’t just involve creating two sites and choosing a different contract length for each but also isolating variables as well). By testing things, you can not only figure out what doesn’t work, but you may also stumble on what actually does work with search engines.

I don’t know if we will get away with an amendment for this, but I think we are going to get to a certain point in this digital age that being found by search engines will be as essential as having the right to freedom of speech. We are not there yet, but wouldn’t it be unfair if you put up a site and search engines for some reason refused to pick it up? Of course, if you are a black-hat and you pull a nasty trick, then you will lose your right, but I personally don’t believe we have enough in the constitution to protect us citizens in this modern age.

Just like having the right to own a gun is a right in this country, I believe having access to the Internet and being represented on it through a website should also be a right. Now to be fair, we really don’t have too many laws about this whole thing. Nobody forbids you from owning a site or getting your own domain. But at the same time, search engines don’t really have to index your site.

If you are a logical person, you probably agree with me that we won’t really get that far with whole amendment thing maybe in 50 years. I sure do hope that Mr. Obama will keep the regulation on the Internet to the minimum, but if and when we get to a point where the Internet is heavily regulated, I believe there should be regulations in place to protect us consumers against abuse. Is that too much to ask?