Google+ is actually one of quite a few of Google’s attempts to break into the social media circuit. After a few failed attempts, they have finally found a winner. It stands no chance of competing with Facebook (at least not in the foreseeable future), but is still popular enough to enable you to grab a few SEO benefits from it. It is possible to use Google+ to help you get a little bit higher in the search engine results pages.
Google will follow some of your profile links
If you add a bunch of links onto your Google+ pages then Google may pay them a passing interest, but if you can connect a link to your Google+ profile, then the more popular your profile becomes then the more attention Google will pay to your connected links. You can create connected links by putting them in your profile Bio. Your bio links can have the anchor text of your choice, and if you gain more influence on Google+, then Google will take more notice of your links and will rank up your website slightly.
Do not forget that social media is not the powerful and almighty tool that online “experts” are claiming it is. Google, Bing/Yahoo do pay attention to what goes on within the social media sites. But, just how much credit they give what happens on there is anybody’s guess. Suffice it to say that nobody has ever reached the number one spot on Google because of something that happened on social media.
You can embed links onto your posts
As mentioned above, you can add links to your pages on Google+ (or your posts, as they are also known). Again, as stated above, the links will only be paid a passing attention by Google and will affect your websites SEO (assuming the links point to your website). However, if your links are shared amongst a large number of people then Google will pay attention to them and rank your website up accordingly. This is because if a link is shared by a number of people, then Google assumes that the link (and therefore the page) is of importance, and will move it up the search engine results pages.
Learn a little bit about linking. The backlinks you receive from other websites are more valuable than the links you receive from social media. But that does not mean you should cast social media out to sea. If a few big hitters on social media start linking to your site and mentioning you online, then the Google algorithm is going to start paying very close attention to your website.
You can optimize G+ title tags
You may have noticed that when you post something on Google+ then the first part of the post becomes the posts title tag. The title tag can be optimized so that it ranks better and so that there is a higher chance of a click through rate increase. Just make sure to choose the keywords of your first line very carefully. If you do this then the link attached to your post will have a higher click through rate. If this is the case then Google will pay more attention to the link, and will increase the rank of the page it links to accordingly.
You should take time to learn a little more about G+ tags, as well as other tags on blogs and Meta tags on your website. They do act similarly to keywords within text, but do have a different function. This is because they are designed to speak directly to either the search engines or the social media engine. This means that there are lots of rules that apply to these tags that do not apply to web content. For example, it is okay to misspell words on tags, and it is okay to hyphenate words that would not usually be hyphenated.
People who are authors with Google+ gain SEO benefits
They have an authoring system where you can attach your Google+ profile to the content that you write off of the Google+ site. If you write a lot of good content then you gain a better reputation within Google+, and this comes with better SEO benefits and article popularity benefits. It may even help you to get your online articles indexed a little faster than they would be otherwise. This is because Google is able to find and index the articles a little faster than they would do via other routes. This is because they are following the link from your Google+ profile.
An online reputation is something that is hard to maintain. You need to be on the tip of people’s tongues, because otherwise they will forget you. The Internet is a big place and popularity jumps up and down like an ostrich on a hot bus roof. With Google+ and their authorship program you cannot really make a massive online-reputation splash, but you can leave a mark for people to research into. When a person normally hears you name then he or she may wait for your next publication in order to figure out if he or she likes you. But, with Google+ and its authorship program, he or she has access to lots of your old and already published works.