You are working hard to get your website ranked by the search engines. You have tried everything that the experts tell you to try, but for some reason you are not seeing much movement in your rankings. Honestly, you hate the world of social media and don’t understand how being social with people will lead to higher rankings or people wanting to purchase anything from your company. You ask yourself where does social media fit into my SEO strategy for my website? You have tried Facebook and Twitter and simply don’t have time for this Google+ thing; it’s going to be a “FAD” anyways right?
My immediate response to that is nope, Google+ is here to stay and it will be a big deal in the SEO world. So you should stop ignoring it and give this “fad” the time it deserves. When I say give it the time it deserves, I don’t mean to just sign up for an account and then let it sit there assuming you will see positive results. Like any other SEO technique, you will have to put work into your Google+ account. I’m sure you’ve heard the term a million times “OPTIMIZE” and it applies to your Google+ account too.
I bet you have done Google searches recently and seen the results showing up on the right sidebar labeled “ People and Pages on Google+” related to whatever search term it is your searching for. For example I just did a search for “Social Media” and this is the image that came up on my sidebar. What is the common denominator here? All of these people or companies are using Google+ and have optimized their account with the words social media somewhere in their account. If you see just under that there is a link saying “learn how you could appear here too”, that link leads you to sign up for Google+.
Like I said before you have to put in actual hard work for this to give you results, nothing in the SEO world comes easy or overnight. This is something you have to optimize like you would your webpage or your blog. You need to do several things such as:
- Optimize your Google+ profile
- Optimizing your Circles
- Format your posts headlines
- Create compelling content
- Share compelling content
- Optimize the +1 button
- Confirm ownership of your site/account
- Confirm authorship
You want to make sure you are connected to influential people inside of your industry and make sure that you are optimizing at least your Introduction, Employment, Education, and places. This seems to be where the SEO value is being taken from Google+ at the moment. So put social media in those sections, meaning you’re optimizing for that word, and be sure to make large quality circles that will link back to you.
I’m not going to tell you how to get high-quality people in your circles, but it’s pretty basic and if you want to optimize your Google+ profile correctly, then you need to have high-quality people connecting to your circles. Once you start to get these high-quality people in your circles you better start engaging them too.
After you have your profile optimized, and are starting to build good circles and engaging them, it’s time to start putting high quality compelling content onto Google+. Use it as you would your blog, share videos, share photos, this stuff can rank very quickly.
Of course you need to have your +1 button in the correct places, it seems as though Google is giving more weight to the +1’s you get from your actual site than the +1’s you get from Google+. But, the one thing that is obvious is that Google is putting weight on the number of +1’s you receive.
The next few things you need to do is go through Google+ and confirm ownership of you website of blog. You can do this by linking your Google+ account to your blog or website. You can find these instructions in your Google + account. You can also get a Google+ badge for your website and submit a Google+ page verification request. At this point in time, nobody but Google is sure what this can do for your SEO, but you might as well take the time to get it done. One other thing that is slightly more advanced would be to confirm authorship of your content through authorship markup.
In the end if you’re not on Google+ then it’s money that your business is missing out on. It is obvious to me that at least with Google+ there is a thin line between SEO and social media. Actually I would say they are becoming blurred into one Internet strategy.
