Google has finally embarked the social media journey with full promise and poise.
Google now has access to its own data related to social signals and Google is very much focused on search and according to me the Google+ initiative is mainly aimed at enhancing the quality of search results which is very much affected due to the mal practices because of link building and content spamming.
As my main focus is on search as an SEO I think , it is imperative to be active on Google+ from the web presence perspective due to the following reasons:
· Google+ social signals are going to affect the search results in Google undoubtedly
· Google is also experimenting with business profiles
· These business profiles have a full possibility of being integrated with Google Places affecting local search. http://searchengineland.com/google-pages-coming-for-businesses-83985
· Google+ has the feature of circles by which categorization becomes easy and simple due to which you can manage the personal family and friends circle along with the professional and business circle via the same platform and social media profile.
· Google has introduced the rel author tag and Google clearly mentions on http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=1229920 that you need to add the link to your author page in the list of links on your Google Profile so the co-relation with the rel attribute and the profile of the author can be set and verified.
· Google Plus is already mobile
· Visits to your site from Google+ can be viewed in Google Analytics Reports . You can go to any tab, any report in Google Analytics and see Google+ traffic side by side with your regular traffic, just by selecting the Google+ traffic segment
· Google clearly has mentioned that ,”Our vision is to have google.com/realtime include Google+ information along with other realtime data from a variety of sources.” Hence once the Real Time Search option is active again on the search page the Google+ posts will be listed on it.
In short having a Google+ profile and using it actively will add a plus to the organic SERPs, local search, blogger profile via the rel author tag, real time search option and you will be able to track and measure the Google+ data via Google Analytics.
Though I agree this gives more power to Google to monopolize the search platform but according to me Google very much deserves it and this is one monopoly which may have the maximum market share but keeps on working hard on innovation and keeps competing with its previous results at the same time offers value to the user in the form of information and knowledge in many ways at no extra cost.
1. What more can a user ask for?
2. Do you think your Google+ profile can be neglected as a social media platform or from the search and overall web presence perspective ?
3. Is there any other point you would like to add in the above mentioned list of reasons for having a Google+ Profile?
