If you want to improve your SEO rankings real fast – even if it’s a brand new site – you godda use Google Plus. Some SEOs conducted experiments and the evidence is obvious. Google Plus for SEOs work. If you have a Google + account associated with your site, it usually improves your SERP rankings. So, if you still did not dive into the issue of a Google Plus page for your site, It’s just about time.
Crucial Condition
You need to make sure that your site produces a lot of useful content because content is still king and you won’t be able to get the biggest bang for your buck if your site is not updated regularly and the content you have to offer is really thin. You want to take your time and create the best content you can. That done, you’re ready to go to the next level and promote your site via Google Plus. Let’s see how.
Labels
For starters, you can just go to your Google Plus settings and add a link to your site. The cool part of it is the fact that you can specify a label for your link. That’s actually your anchor text. That means you can get a free text link from an authoritative domain. Kudos to Google!
Now, if you’re not sure which label (anchor text) to use, it depends on your link profile. If your exact keyword usage ratio is way over 20%, you may want to use some random text or even your URL. In case you don’t suffer from over-optimization, it makes perfect sense to use a keyword in your label.
Circles
You may want to create circles depending on the types of audiences you have. Let me explain a bit more in-depth. Suppose you have a web design website that covers a wide variety of topics ranging from raster and vector graphics to CMSs. You can create respective circles (vector graphics, raster graphics, CMSs) and share relevant content to the circle that is most likely to be interested in that.
There are a few benefits in such an approach. For starters, you don’t get on the nerves of the people in your other circles because you share relevant content only. So the people will keep on considering your community as a very useful thing to be a part of. Other than that, you clearly state what kind of content you focus on.
Though there’s no direct proof now, but it’s highly likely that this sort of info will be taken into account in Google’s algorithm. Don’t forget that Google Plus is a part of Google and all the info you share there is available to the actual search engine with little to no effort whatsoever.
Sparks
Sparks are sort of topical content aggregators. You can join other sparks (preferably relevant to your niche) or create your own. Again, you can name them according to the main site sections that you have (vector, raster, CMSs, etc). It will allow you to show once again what your Google Plus profile is all about and what your site’s audiences are. Remember the Big Brother is watching you.
As a side note, I’d like to point out the fact that Google discontinued Google Reader not that long ago. I personally think that sparks are sort of Google Readers within Google Plus. But it’s a totally different story.
+1 Your Stuff
It may sound like a no-brainer to you, but I dare to remind that you need to +1 all your posts on your Google Plus page, because it’ll help your posts stand out from the crowd when your friends do their searches. As multiple studies show, if you can see that your friend liked (+1’ed in our case) something, you are prone to do the same. So, don’t sell this fact short.
Suggestions
These are basically offers from Google Plus to follow other people on the platform. It’s my understanding that it’s defined by your friends and interests that you specified in your profile. Whatever the formula is you can just add as many folks to your profile as you can because it’ll make it possible to get the biggest exposure out there.
Since you have something in common (either a friend or interest), you always have a conversation ice-breaker at your disposal. That’s usually a godsend because we are all sick of the strangers who try to sell us something all the time. 🙂
Screencasts
As you probably know, you can easily add videos to your Google+ stream. In case you can create tutorials about an SEO piece of software or something along those lines, you can just record whatever you do daily as an SEO guy.
You can use ScreenFlow (Mac) or Camtasia (Windows) because they seem to work best. At least based on my experience. Since most people prefer videos, you’ll be able to achieve a better engagement and lure more people to your site to check out more stuff.
In Conclusion
As Google+ is a social media platform from the biggest search engine out there, it makes perfect sense that it should play some role in Google’s search engine results. And it gets more obvious over the course of time that the role is actually growing. Don’t miss out on the chance to make use of the platform because it is not really rocket science.
If you have experience with using Google Plus for your SEO or any kind of business, please share your insights in the comments section below.
