Google+ and Social Currency Will be Driving Your Business Growth in the Future

Google+ (and other social media ) and the impact on SEO.

We all know the importance of search engine optimisation (SEO) to almost anybody that has an internet presence for their business and wants to get business from it. The top 3 positions on google will get the vast majority of traffic and everybody else will be sharing out the dregs.

Most of us know the basics of SEO in order to get to the top of google:

• SEO friendly websites
• Keyword (or Keyphrase) selection
• On-page Optimisation
• Content – freshness, depth and quality
• backlinks

If you’re not so sure, you best be sure to subscribe to my blog on the form on this site.

But there is an increasing trend in SEO, particularly with Google, to take into account your social impact as well.

But what do we mean by social impact, well its the response, interest and interaction you and your brand get on the social media platforms. Be that facebook, twitter, stumble upon and digg and now the big new shiny object – Google+ (altogether now ooohhh)

Google (and no doubt others will follow the trend) is interested in your on page social impact, ie the number of people who click a Facebook like button on your page, or the number of people who tweet out your page or click your Google + button.

So for the first instance you need to make sure you have these functions built into your pages, or you don’t stand a chance of getting them pressed.

Key actions: put social media buttons on your site –

Top Tip, if you using wordpress (which I always recoment) you can get a plug-in called sociable that will automatically but the key buttons at the bottom (except google+, which you can put in a widget at the side of the page)

Now make sure you have the appropriate social media accounts, a Facebook Fanpage (its very easy to set up), your Google+ account and of course twitter, and make sure you connect it to your business contacts and customers. (you can import your contacts into them from outlook in most cases) and if you in a B2B business you need to have a LinkedIn account too.

Now why is Google+ so important?

Well its simple, if your surfing the internet and find a great site selling cool T-shirts and click the +1 button (a Google+ like), it will put the site onto your stream, which similar to Facebook newsfeed will promote the site to those people that are connected to you. However it does not end there, if later on one of your connections is searching for a t-shirt site, Google will know you +1′ed that site, know they are connected to you and so move that site up through the rankings on the search result, which is incredibly powerful, and guess what it does not end there. If a contact of your contact (who you are not linked to) independently searches for T-shirts the same powerful effect will take effect.

So the key is get that google+ button on your site and make sure you are linked to as many people as possible and click the +1 buttons on your own site.

So how do you get people to click your Google +1 button or Facebook like button.

Well its simple ask them to click on it, be bold, be brazen and have a big arrow on your site that says please click our +1 or facebook like button. Research has shown that asking for it increases response by up to 600%

Now Get Social?

There is no escaping it you need to get social, get active on Facebook, Twitter, and Google + and if your business to business get on LinkedIn too – more strategies to follow that will help you tackle these social outlets.