The buzz about Google+ is increasing by the day amongst SEO professionals. While it is abundantly clear that social signals are impacting search rankings, the discussion has moved on to whether Google+ might carry extra weightage in deciding the search ranking of websites.
Why Google+ May be More Important for SEO
Google+ is a fairly new entrant in the field of social media platforms as compared to stalwarts like Facebook and Twitter. And naturally, the number of people on Google+ is far lesser. Yet Google+ may be more important for SEO because
- It is owned by Google, the undisputed search engine giant. Hence Google+ data is 100% crawlable by Google bots, while Facebook and Twitter have restrictions in the data that can be accessed by Google (search engine).
- Google+ posts are indexed more quickly, less than a minute for logged in users, according to this post.
The question now is how to maximize the SEO benefits of Google+. Here are 4 tips to do so.
4 Tips to Maximize SEO Benefits of Google+
1. Embed Keyword Anchor Text Links in your Bio
Did you know that Google+ offers do-follow links in its profile section? So while completing your bio, you can use your keyword anchor texts and expect maximum SEO benefits as it offers link juice.
The Google+ profile page has a ‘links’ section on the right side, where you can choose what links to put and also use the anchor text of choice.
And the fact Google+ is page rank 8 website, definitely helps in SEO. Refer to this video for more details.
2. Embed Links in your Posts
The links in your Google+ posts are also dofollow. And you can insert as many links as you want. Simply enter the complete url and Google automatically formats it as a link. With a carefully planned out Google+ content strategy, you can have numerous inbound links pointing to your website with corresponding SEO benefits.
3. Use the Google +1 Button
The +1s you receive are social signals that can boost SEO. The more +1s you receive, you can expect higher rankings. For instance this experiment by SEOMOz resulted in +1s boosting the search rank of a website from #16 to #6.
Also content +1d by friends has a higher ranking in the personalized search results (the default setting). Thus when more people +1 your content, it increases the chances that you will occupy a higher spot in the search results of more people.
4. Implement Google Authorship
Google+ allows you to identify yourself as the author of the content and highlights author information with a headshot alongside your content in the results page. This extra snippet makes your result stand out even if you are not at the top and you can receive more click thrus than the top search results. Refer here for more information on Google authorship.
What strategies have you used to maximize the SEO benefits of Google+?