Since Google Plus has not lived up to the hype as of late, the juggernauts up at Google have decided "Let's not worry about it anymore, let's just slam it down everyone's throat and force them to use it." I recently I wanted to see how much weight Google was putting on Google plus so I bought 2 domains and did nothing but Titles, Meta's some internal linking -- and I bought hundreds of Google Plus votes for the sites. Within a few weeks they were ranking well and staying. Of course they dropped off eventually because I didn't do anything at all to them content wise, but it proved to me at least that Google is putting a heavy weight on Plus votes and will only become more of an important signal as we move forward into 2014. Don't believe me just perform a search for your name and check the domain distribution of first 100 results. Even though you may use other social sites such as Twitter and Facebook more often, Google+ outshines the rest when it comes to SERPs. So how can you prepare your Google Plus page for the inevitable heavy hand that is sure to force us all to use G+ like mindless robots? Here are some good places to start.
1. Pay Attention to your Profile Links
With Google+ not only can you link to your other awesome profiles across the universe, you can also embed followed links directly into your bio with the anchor text of your choice, sweet! The value of a link from Google+ is, not unlike others, it still depends on the authority of the domain and a host of other super secret cool stuff. If you can let your personality shine and get more people to engage with you by sharing or direct links to your profile, the more valuable your profile links become. Also there are the areas of your Google+ profile where you can get dofollow links back to your website. It used to be where, all links on your profile were dofollow, but now only the ones in your Introduction and links to other sites are.
2. Don't Forget Titles and Meta Descriptions
So here is a little nugget of info hat most of either don't know or have overlooked. You can control some fundamental SEO items on your Google + profile such as Meta Description and Titles. How you ask? Well here is what you need to remember
- Title Tag: The SEO title for your Google+ profile is your name followed by Google+. This means try to create an organically sound way to incorporate your name and anything else you want to rank for. Such as "Mike Campolattano a Search Marketing Professional". Here we have all of the important items I want to include. First my name and then the key term I want to be synonymous with "Search Marketing Professional"
- Meta Description: That's right you control the Meta description for your Google+ profile! Items such as your name, your tagline, your occupation, and even your location and some of your introduction content. So look at all of these items on paper and see what is the most relevant way to say and present these items but remember anything after 160 characters gets cut off in search results, so keep a steady character count.
3. Know your Business
For a local business page on Google+, the on-site SEO stuff isn't as exciting as profiles or regular pages. Your Title tag will be the name of your business and your Meta description will reflect the description you entered about your business, so be very cautious and thorough when you create your company description as this will come up in search results. Now even though you can't add links to your descriptions like you can in profiles and regular pages the link to your website here is unfortunately a Nofollow. Don't let that deter you from claiming your Google plus profile and add it as it does appear in local search results.
4. Side Bar Links
Here you need to pay close attention. The side bar area offers up a rel opportunity to do some meaningful optimization when it comes to you or your business. Google loves links to other profiles, areas of contribution and recommended links and they want you to showcase these if possible from a links perspective. Here you can build your professional profile as well as create some powerful link juice to each
5. Optimize your Content
Optimizing your content for semantic search is a vital and mostly overlooked piece to the Plus puzzle. Remember you profile attributes such as photos, about and posts all stream together to form one big picture of you in the eyes of Google. If you want to be considered an authority within your given niche than it the perception that matters and not entirely what's real. I mean if you think about it things like fundamental SEO or link building on a website, are now secondary to how a website is perceived. Sharing and trustworthiness are creating social signals that our friends at Google use to try to derive what your website does, how relevant it is and ultimately if it should be shown in the SERPs. So think of whom you are and what you stand for and if you want to recognized as an authority within a given subject you should be very careful about what you post on your Plus profile.
Well I'm sure there are other great creative ways to optimize your Google Plus profile and I am going to enjoy every minute of trying to figure them out. Remember Google Plus isn't going away so learn it, love it and get optimizing.