Optimizing Your Google Plus Profile

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Google Plus is the latest social network to really catch wind; it is progressing at an increasing rate and is at roughly 50 million users. Facebook is however, on over 800 million users. Googles’ 50 million is not something to be sniffed at, it IS expanding extremely fast and is a contender in the social media world.

Taking into consideration it is a definite possibility that Google plus will dominate social networking, businesses need to think about how they can put set up the equivalent to a Facebook page, and not only that, but how to optimize it.

Google Plus is quite different to Facebook, in terms of rankings, there are things you can do to help you rank for search terms on Google +. I have conducted a case study which can be found on the SEO Positive Blog, this case study shows an provides examples of each factor and how effective they are.

The key points to take away from this study are that the introduction, Employment and Nicknames sections have the highest value. Something that is not mentioned within the study is that you should keep your profile optimization as white hat as possible, that means no keyword stuffing and so on. Remember the Big G created, owns and runs this platform. So if you want to play in their playground, you’re going to have follow their rules.

When we talk about Facebook page optimization, we tend to mean the appearance and usability for our fans… or potential fans. So there are a few things we can do here.

Content

Content is and will always be king, you need to include keywords for the ranking value, but make sure it is all legible and is actually useful information. If you have the rankings but not the content to convert, then all of your optimization efforts have been wasted.

Pictures

Googles’ albums are beautiful, especially when compared to their brother, Facebook. So make sure all your images are high quality and do justice to the platform.

Similar to Facebook, there is a banner section which is called the scrapbook. Unlike Facebook, Google does not randomize the images, which means you can use the banner space as an advert; the banner is also bigger which allows more information to be displayed. This is an area where you or your designers can really get creative and set yourself out from the competition.

Finally, your profile picture has a neat animation, it allows two images to be your display picture, one is set as your default but if you have two and click onto the display picture, it will switch to the second. In Chrome and Safari browsers, the image will actually rotate, which is a cool little animation. Again this is another opportunity you have to get creative with your profile.

Conclusion

These are all of the features Google has to offer right now, it is clear they are trying to keep the platform simple and not overcrowded. There is no doubt that there is more to come, but these are the different features of the network you can hone to your advantage, so make the most of them.

This article was written by the Social Media Manager, Lewis Austin, who works for SEO Positive, For more information about SEO Positive…Follow their Twitter Profile or Blog  

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