The Google search engine has over 200 signals it uses when deciding where to rank websites in their index. Add to this the serious push they are making to compete with Facebook in the social world, which has brought about the Google+ button. Google themselves say that they will consider Plus Ones in their ranking factors, but whether they have said this just to get the thousands of SEO companies pushing for Google+ still remains to be seen.
We are all constantly battling to get our websites ranking well on Google, and the new Google+ is just one of the factors provided by Google which can be used to make our websites more visible on the Web. One example of this would be the ubiquitous Google Places. It’s simply a great tool for consumers to find local businesses, and with the right attention to SEO we can get our Google Places ranking higher than our competition. Another example is YouTube. It may be hard to get your site to rank for certain keywords, but Google loves to put video results on page one when relevant, and Google just so happens to own the world’s biggest video site. Even if this means they’re technically ranking their own stuff for visibility, you can benefit from this by using YouTube and videos to promote your business.
We won’t go through all of the examples right now, but you should be trying to be found in Google’s various other search engines besides just the main Google Web Search. These can in turn get you found in results from regular searches via universal search. Google+ has introduced a whole new realm of SEO possibilities based on getting found via Google’s own properties. For one, Google ranks Google+ posts in search results and they often appear on the first page. The +1 button obviously helps your search visibility cause. Google made it clear from the beginning that this would be a search signal. If enough people like your content enough to give it a +1, it must be good right? Why not bump it up in the rankings.
This entry was posted on Thursday, January 19th, 2012 at 4:29 pm and is filed under General, SEO, Social Networking, Web Marketing.
