Here’s a new bit from the world of search that it’s rather urgent that you know: Google is taking personalized search to a new level.

First, what is personalized search? It’s where the search engine tracks your user preferences and takes them into account when presenting search results. For example, if you are doing a recipe search (to use Google’s own example), have done such a search in the past, and usually navigate to epicurious.com, Google is more likely to rank epicurious.com higher on your results page than other recipe pages.

Now Google has done this for some time—on an opt-in basis for users signed in to their Google accounts. Their recent announcement extends this to every Google user, whether they have signed up, opted in, or even know it’s happening. Your search history will in part determine your search results.

That might be a boon to established sites with a good search history. It sure isn’t good news for new publishers trying to break in, or for ones who are just getting around to working on their search optimization.

It’s kind of like that corner newsstand that will display the cooking titles that have proved themselves but keep tucked away in the back the ones that haven’t yet done so, isn’t it?

So what does that mean to us as online publishers? It means we have to work even harder to get and to keep our loyal audience. We need them coming to us from all sources, not just Google; and we can’t rely only on our SEO efforts to reward us with high rankings. We have to make sure that our audience will visit our site by using our social media, our email lists; we need to snag every possible visitor to our site and capture their name and get it into our database; we need to keep those visitors happy while they are there so they will return so our page will continue to show up in search results.

We also need to make sure that our descriptions are enticing so when our site does appear on page one of the search results we get the clicks we need.

In other words, we need to implement best practices—the same best practices that have put us in business and kept us in business in the first place.