How To Use Google Plus for Search Engine Rankings
The key to establishing Search Engine Domination is, in part, having a regular presence across the more popular social networking websites. But Google+ is a special case. Whether or not your target market doesn’t have a huge presence on Google+ doesn’t matter.
If your rankings in search engine results is important to you, then you need to be on Google+.
Why Google Plus?
There are three facts that you need to know to understand why Google+ is important, then we’ll get into the how.
- Google is, by far, the number one search engine.
- Google owns Google+.
- Google factors your Google+ presence into its search results.
So while you can get by without a Google+ page and still show up in Google’s results, it’s much better to be on Google+. Having a presence there, updating regularly, and connecting with others will result in a better ranking in Google.
Set Up An Account
If you don’t already have a Google+ account, you’ll need to start by setting that up. If you have an account with most Google-owned websites, you can use the same login information for Google+. Those sites include:
- Gmail
- Google Search
- Google Maps
- Picasa
- Google News
- Google Calendar
- Google Docs
- Google Sites
- YouTube
Set Up A Page
Once you’ve created your account, you’ll need to create a page for your organization. That’s actually a fairly quick process as well. Just visit Google Plus’s official page to do so.
After you’ve created your account, you’ll need to connect it to your website. You’ll need a little bit of technical ability, or have someone with some technical ability do it for you. You’ll also need access to the code behind your website. Typically, that’s achieved through FTP.
If you have no clue what FTP is, that’s perfectly okay. You’ll probably need to grab someone who is more technically inclined than yourself to help you out.
You (or they) will need to make sure your home page links to your Google+ page somewhere, using this format:
<a href="https://plus.google.com/[yourpageID]" rel="publisher">Find us on Google+</a>
To find out what your page ID is, just navigate to your page in Google+ and find the numbers in your browser’s address bar. It will be a fairly long number.
Once you’ve added that code to your website, you need to make sure your Google+ page links to your website’s home page. You must use the main Website option on Google+, and it has to link straight to a page that includes the above code.
Once you’ve done that, your ranking will start being affected by your presence on Google+.