The best thing about Google Plus is that it is from the stable of Google itself. Google being the mother of all the search engines, clearly rules the roost in the SEO business. This search engine that is highly ensconced in terms of popularity obviously is bound to favor Google plus over a wide range of other social networks. Google+ itself is popular enough to garner enough audience for the search engine, Google.
How popular is Google+?
Google+ has over 359 million monthly active users and its active user base grew by 33 percent from June 2012 through to March 2013. It was the first social network to reach 10 million users within a span of 16 days. It has surpassed Twitter to become the second largest social network, the first being Facebook.
What Google+ lacks as compared to Facebook is supplied with its association with Google. Google is spread over a vast expanse of the human race to every nook and corner of the globe, so much so that its very name is synonymous with the term ‘search engine’. Hence the popularity of Facebook is not a problem.
Google+’s inception was to aid the search engine, Google
Google’s introduction of Google+ to the social networking audience was much more than competing with the ultra-popular giants like Facebook and Twitter. It was an attempt to bring all the services under the bracket of Google and provide more data to enrich the services of the search engine, thus commanding more authority on the cyber space.
How does it accomplish this?
As people create profiles and use and browse various websites while remaining signed in to Google, its bots can collect a lot of information about their inclinations and thus tag their identity with this data. Google also gets such data while people use Google+ by a number of ways such as simply +1’ing things on the internet or sharing and engaging with other people in their network.
This data collected from Google+ helps Google to better the organic results as well as results for advertising the users. This way it can narrow down to the people who really have a liking for certain ads and target them more accurately. The Google+ users can become more responsive as result of this and because of end-user satisfaction, they are drawn to use Google more and more.
What is the connection between Google+ and SEO?
Google Search makes use of the content you have posted and shared with your circle of friends on Google+. When using ‘Search Plus Your World’, your Google+ friends can see the results by order of relevance, you being in their circles.
To put it clearly, you have furnished your particulars about the select friends within your circles by stating that you both are known to each other. Taking advantage of this, your Google+ posts and pages are available to these friends of yours whenever they search for suitable information regarding you on Google Search. These posts are shared because each post is sorted as a ‘page’ with its own URL and are ‘flowing’ links from the original post/page.
You can sum it up this way:
1. If you approve your posts on Google+ to be publicly shared, they will appear for anyone on Google Search.
2. If you don’t share them publicly you stunt the prospects of your reach to a wider audience, but optimizing them to a select audience.
3. The people in your circle get a whole lot of benefits with personalized search results and more the people in your circles, the better personalized search results are.
4. Growing an appropriate network of people in your circles will help you make the most of Google+ and Google Search.
PageRank on Google+ to aid in SEO
Google Search can be manipulated by using Google+ profiles. The PageRank collected comes not only to our root profile, but also back from your shared posts, which get them from other profiles by being shared around.
This is another way of saying that each individual post, which is normally treated as a page by Google Search, collects PageRank based on the number of times it is shared and referenced outside of Google+. This makes certain largely referenced posts and pages to have high PageRank and others that are left out, none.
This is the same way many websites on the internet distribute PR within themselves, or blogs with popular guest bloggers. The root blogging sites may actually receive most of their PageRank from other guest blogs, they in turn receive their citations directly from other websites, or blogs referring to them.
To be brief, all the mentions in the tag within the post to profiles or pages, as well as the embedded link and the original author’s post is shared in the PageRank from that post. This way the PageRank is being passed around to just about everyone like a new page by way of these posts.
Other factors that facilitate in PageRank (PR)
Other than posts and pages, a lot of other factors too contribute to PageRank and thus SEO. Here are two of them- both of these working in tandem can boost your SEO.
1. Following people in high PR profiles
Being in the constant company of high PR profiles can make you noticeable as these profiles can draw a lot of followers that are connected to them and even other profiles that they themselves are connected to. These second circle of followers are in all likelihood to recommend you to other valuable contacts by sharing your posts and the like.
But to achieve high PR, you have to interact with these profiles. Staying mum won’t do. This allows the high authority person to pass on the authority by way of mentions pertaining to your profile or page. This makes you garner a lot of attention from a diverse group of users. Numbers won’t do the trick, but high PR profiles do. Thus, you can be better placed in the search results.
2. Embedding your links in authoritative web pages
Having a sizeable number of back links to your profile or brand page from authoritative web pages can build the PR and search authority of your profile or page. This is on the lines of any regular web page. These links to your profile help you build a powerful network on Google+.
+1s can set off a chain reaction
If a person shares a Google+ post by way of a website’s +1 share button, the content has the potential of appearing on the profile pages of a number of people with a good PR, provided you have them in your circles. This depends on the quality or prominence with respect to the initiator- if he is well connected, there are more chances of you being publicized.
There can be a sharing spree on part of the audience on Google+ as a new sharer becomes the new author of the content, if the person has Google authorship set up. This could make their face to appear next to the shared post. There is a possibility of even the original author of the post getting outranked.
Conclusion
Google+ can transform the very experience of SEO by a range of features explained above. Being associated with the brand Google, it is likely to be favored by a range of products that come under its roof such as Picasa, wherein a huge number of photos from its vault are directly available to Google Search and thus can be tagged with the profiles on Google+ that means narrowing down the search to produce more accurate results.
This personalization of search results makes Google+ a must for people vouching to promote their brands on a number of platforms. Though they may have faltered meeting various expectations regarding their SEO needs, this association with Google+ by way of opening an account on it surely is worth a try and there are very less chances of them being discouraged.
Also, there are less chances of building authority of profile and pages on the web through ‘regular’ methods. These features of Google+ are real shortcuts to building them. Elsewhere, they come from a lot of efforts put in through promoting your products by marketing and a lot of relationship building strategies. These efforts, especially put in marketing can be exhausting and draining to the company, but here it is all served on a platter by just opening a brand page or profile and the Google+ platform does the rest. Surely Google+ is worth every penny for ailing businesses and those wanting to make a mark in the business sphere.
