Google+ Uses SEO to steal from Facebook and Twitter

There has been some stealing going on in regards to Google+, have you noticed that if you have a Google+ profile then it will rank really well when you type in your name and the search results are shown.

Google+ is a fairly new social networking site but for some who have worked on Facebook and Twitter profiles for years it is all a bit disheartening when Google+ profiles with less effort put into them are ranking higher.

But it isn’t just the profiles which are ranking higher; Google+ posts are starting to make more of an appearance within the results as well.

Ranking for a name is a key priority of search and ranking on the first page for a specific name is lucrative territory and highly sought after. Both search and socials have moved to focus on the individual and so the competition for estate has begun and the fight is on.

Already though how has Google managed to get so much of this prime estate within such a short period of time? Are Google cheating their own system and going against what they judge so many others on?

The answers to the above two questions are in effect NO! What Google does is use some highly effective Search Engine Optimisation techniques. Below is our guide to how they do it:

Incentivise Inbound Links

Google decided to start displaying photos of authors within its search results but why? Were people that interested in seeing an author? Probably not but behind the scenes Google were being very clever. In order for a photo to be displayed Google had to ask authors to add links from their web pages to their Google+ profile and thus millions of high quality links from around the world all pointed to Google+ profiles. But these weren’t just any inbound links they came from the most influential online publishers.

Linking Internally

Note that when Google+ was released it was so easy to get yourself into a number of circles or add numerous amounts of people to your own. It was that easy that overnight you could find yourself in around 2000-3000 Google+ circles! This wasn’t the case with Twitter and Facebook when people struggled to find you.

This strategy to connect people from all areas of the earth made for excellent internal linking and although following more than 1000 people isn’t all that socially pleasing it provided Google with a great SEO opportunity. The more the content is shared in streams and profiles the more it is crawled, indexed and thus deemed important by search engines.

Include Content Which Can Be Indexed

A Google+ profile is different to that of Facebook and Twitter in that it contains a wealth of information from full text of public posts, photos, links to people in circles and everything you have ever clicked +1 on.

When this is compared to Twitter, you are limited to 160 characters of bio information and Facebook is all the same auto-generated information. When a search engine sees this they will see the following words on average on each profile:

  • Facebook – 275 words
  • Twitter – 500 words
  • Google+ - 2500 words

Google have the upper hand as they have effectively made their social networking profiles more search engine friendly and thus they are ranking higher. If you want to rank highly within the search engines just like Google+ have managed to in such a short space of time then what you need to do is create content.

You need to ensure that there are large amounts of content but these bits of content needs to be search engine friendly. If you can carry out these same SEO strategies then you will be able to raise yourself in search. Google+ has 62 million users and this is growing every single day, as they carry on their SEO work too there will be lots more Google+ related posts within the search results.

If you want to get ahead of your competitors within the search engines and rank hire that them you should come to Brick technology. We have our own internet marketing team and are perhaps the only web design company who has a dedicated editor who will ensure that all content is search engine friendly, unique, engaging and fully optimised.

Our internet marketing team can offer you so much! Come and discuss your options with us today and start the ball rolling so that you can be in that prime location within the search results.

For more information please call us on 01254 277190 or email info@brickweb.co.uk.

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