Best Practices on Google+ for Maximum SEO Benefit

Google + has been with us for a while now, though it has recently become more apparent how Google are planning to incorporate it into search and how it will affect SEO in the long term. With the release of Google’s Search Plus Your World we have started to see the social and search boundaries merge, making it ever more important to be participating socially online in order to get the most out of search.

Below are our recommendations for gaining a good presence on Google+ and maximising the SEO value it has to offer:

Optimise Your Profile

One of the key elements of ranking in the search results pages is the information you provide in the Introduction, Employment, Education and Places sections of your profile, so make sure you fill these in as thoroughly as possible. If you’re looking to rank for a particular phrase then you need to include that in the text somewhere (without being spammy), and ideally in more than one of the different sections.

Be the Author

Google+ is another step towards the influence of “AuthorRank” and it gives you the opportunity to benefit further from claiming writing as your own using the rel=author tag. The first step you should take on your website or blog is implementing this author tag, thus telling Google it’s your content. The more authority you can gain in your circles, the more likely you are to see yourself in the search results with a nice picture which will help you increase the click through rate on your search listings.

This also opens up opportunities if you can get influential people to guest post on your blog and tag themselves as the author. If content starts to get ranked based on who wrote it, then you could start seeing your own site in the search results based on authoritative people contributing.

Produce Great Content

Back to rule #1 of any SEO campaign! Great content is essential if you are going to attract attention from people in your niche, whatever platform you are on. If you create appealing, sharable content then you will increase your exposure, authority and success on Google+. It’s not enough on its own, but it makes everything else a whole lot easier if you’ve got it!

Share Great Content

It’s important not to be selfish when you’re sharing (selfish and sharing don’t go together too well do they?!), make sure you promote other people’s stuff that you read and enjoy as well as your own. As good as your content is, it isn’t the only great content out there! Try and mention/tag people whose content you share too, as this will also encourage them to follow you and share your content in the future.

Promote the +1 Button

Having the +1 button in a prominent position on your site will encourage people to share it, adding it to their Google+ feed. As well as bringing you valuable traffic, this will tell Google that users are engaging with your site and view it as a worthy source of information.

Format Google+ Posts

If you’re going to the effort of maintaining a Google+ account and sharing useful information and links, make sure you take the final step and format your posts when you add them. Just copying and pasting a link isn’t enough to generate interest, clicks and engagement, you need to write a worthwhile post which tells people what the link is about. This will also be used as the title of the post in the search engine results pages so it’s certainly worth putting some thought into it!

Be Genuine!

Above all, the key to success on Google+ is being genuine, sharing quality material with people and building relationships on there. If you try to cut corners and use only as a way to improve your SEO, you will likely end up with some short term success (if any) which disappears pretty quickly as Google continues to hone the algorithm. Play the long game and you could end up as an influencer in your niche, who gets fantastic results from search as a very welcome side product!

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