Getting Started with Google Plus – Part 3

Part 1 Getting Started with Google Plus

Part 2 Getting Started with Google Plus

 

Keep in mind that even though there are various technical glitches to using Google Plus effectively for SEO purposes – remember that back in the day before WordPress became popular, it was far easier to rank in Google.

As such, its worth persevering with because being able to harness the power offered by Google Plus as an internet marketer sooner rather than later means you’ll be well ahead of the game.

 

This part of the series of how to get started with Google Plus is a bit higgledy piggledy. What I’m trying to do here is to work through setting up an account and dotting all the i’s and crossing all the t’s. But in true Google fashion, its not quite as straight forward as it could be. What’s more, some parts of “the system” are still not fully functional, so I’m having to work around that as best I can.

 

Google Plus Search Your World

Google Plus Search Your World is simply a way for Google (and for ourselves) to bring lots of different information together so that its possible to access that information from one point on the internet. Unfortunately because its a new concept, its still not available in all countries. In fact, I don’t think its yet available in most countries at the time of writing this. I’ll be providing more info on Google Plus Search Your World as Google builds it out.

 

Google Plus is Not a Sales Vehicle

Remember, Google Plus is not a sales vehicle. Therefore, “keep it clean” – meaning, don’t just use G+ for procuring sales. Use it to convey information to those folks who are following you.

Chances are that more and more folks will follow you if you provide good quality content and you don’t get too pushy on the sales front. Its common sense, really. Google Plus is a social signals tool which means that we want to reduce our reliance on it for making outright sales.

Having said that of course, we want to use it as a funnel to enhance our sales, but in a non-intrusive fashion.

 

Focus on Your Targeted Keyword Phrases

Do try to insert your targeted keyword phrases in your content. Obviously if you are posting up a blog post via Google Plus, then your keywords are going to be in your content, and your main keywords are possibly/probably going to be the title of your article (although that rarely happens in my case since I write my blog posts to attract people’s attention rather than writing for the search engines – that’s your call of course – if you can do both then that’s all the better!).

 

SEO Value of Google Plus

Now, what about SEO value? After all, when its all said and done, one of the main things about using Google Plus for us as internet marketers is SEO.

Our Google Plus accounts can rise in PageRank very fast because as we get more people to join our circles, they will (hopefully) start linking to our G+ content and sharing it with their circles – yup – viral!

What that then does is to offer PR “juice” (or “Author Rank” status, if you will) straight to the posts which we’ve added to our G+ account. And in turn, this boosts our rankings in Google. Imagine having a PR7 backlink from a Google owned web property which goes straight to your website. It may not sound like much – a single high PR link – but it is a lot because in time we can build up the number of super high power backlinks using Google Plus alone.

I wish I had some examples of rankings I’ve achieved with this, but its early days and I’m just figuring out Google Plus myself so I can then relate it back to you.

Unfortunately, at the time of writing, where gaining SEO value from individual keyword phrases is concerned, its not quite as straightforward as we would like. Currently, instead of being able to add keywords for anchor text, we are left with something like this…

https://plus.google.com/114339448957237826785/

 

I would add here however that it will not take long before there are various WordPress plugins available whereby you can insert keywords of your choice and thereby gain full SEO benefits.

 

Author Rank

You may have been hearing about “Author Rank” recently. Some people are saying that author rank will be the new Google PageRank, so its worth paying attention when you hear author rank being mentioned.

Author Rank is not actually a Google format – it comes from HTML 5.

There are a number of benefits to be had from author rank. The image below of my blog’s ranking is an example of how author rank shows in search. Basically author rank means that my image now shows up beside my blog’s search result for “Joseph Archibald”.

 

 

The rel=”author” tag is the author rank tag which was created within HTML 5. This specifies the author of a particular website and is attributable to a “normal” Google+ account.

However, there’s also a rel=”publisher” tag which was depicted by Google. This is the tag to be used when you set up multiple different business accounts with Google+. You can do that when you want to set up a different account for each different niche site you have.

Now, the main benefits of these tags – both publisher and author, is that firstly, with the image beside your website, click through to your website will almost inevitably rise since folks who find a site in Google search where there’s an image beside it tend to click there first before checking out the other results on the page. This has proven to be the case time and again whereby other webmasters who are now using Google Plus on their sites are seeing much higher click through rates on their search rankings.

Secondly, chances are high that more of your content will in fact be indexed in Google because this is very much in Google’s interests whilst they are determined to out-compete the likes of Facebook.

So, how do we add the rel=”author” attribute to our website or websites?

Well, there are various free plugins which are available (for WordPress.org). I tried a couple but was somewhat dumbfounded in trying to follow the processes necessary. Perhaps the easiest way (if you are not technically inclined) is to visit this site:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1408986

 

If you choose Option 1 (near the bottom of the page) where it says Link your content to your Google+ profile using a verified email address – when you read what to do it does sound a bit goofy, but then Google is notorious for goofy (elusive) writing style. Its fairly easy to get this right – I managed to do it and I’m dumb where technological “challenges” are concerned.

The downside to using this method is that you have to add a snippet of html coding to each of your pages you wish to introduce to Google Plus. Its pretty easy in fact. Here’s the code…

<a href=”[profile_url]?rel=author”>Google</a>

Replace [profile_url] with the your Google+ profile URL, like this:

<a href=”https://plus.google.com/109412257237874861202?
rel=author”>Google</a>

 

Are you still following? I thought maybe not.

Check out step 2 on this page (at the base of the page) because this should make more sense:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1408986

 

Your image will not show up in search immediately. Mine took about a week once I’d emailed Google about my blog, and I still did not have my pages set up correctly.

Apparently for more “authoritative” sites, it happens more quickly. So, if your site is fairly new, this could take a few weeks to be fully implemented.

You can check that you’ve set everything up correctly by visiting this site and entering the URL of your website…

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

 

Errors will show up in red. Don’t be alarmed if there are a few errors. The main parts you want to get right are at the top – see the image below for an example of what I see with regards to my own blog…

 

 

As you can see, there are a few errors, but I’m not going to spend hours and hours fiddling around with this. My image is showing up in search beside my blog and my blog appears to be linked correctly to my Google Plus account. For now, that’s all that concerns me.