Google Plus Direct Connect for SEO
Just watched a great hangout on setting up Google + badges and connecting your website to your Google + business page.
Big Whup, you say? You’ve already got the Google + button on your site, you don’t need no stinkin badge?
Well, yeah..you do. Here’s why.
Google Direct Connect.
Once you install this badge to your site and link it to your Google + business page (doesn’t work with personal accounts as of now…bummer), you are automagically added a brand new search feature known as Direct Connect.
To see what this is, just go to Google and start your search with +’keyword’, e.g. +cat. Here’s an example of what you’ll see.
According to Jenny Murphy over at Google, the keywords being pulled in for use are contained in the Title of the Google + business page. So make sure you optimize those business page titles, people.
Another cool feature of this is that once you click on one of the ‘plus’ results, you go right to the Google plus business page, where you’re presented with a pop-up to follow that page. Nice.
Installing the badge on your site is pretty simple, it just requires a few lines of code. You’ll have to sign up for a Google + platform account first, then get the code from the Google + Platform developer page.
As long as you have the Google Plus button already on your site, all you need to do is add one more line of code:
<g:plus href="https://plus.google.com/{plusPageUrl}"></g:plus>
Cool, thanks for the tip.
It’s worth nothing that you need a decent amount of followers to be eligible for this. I can’t find the source now, but I read somewhere it was 1000. Might have been a post on G+… I’ll try and find it!
Did anyone ever figure out a minimum follower requirment?
Just added Google + integration on my site because of this.
Rich – Yeah, that would make total sense.
I set it up for several clients the day I heard about it and was beginning to think that Google was just filtering out some of the keyword rich terms. If you can find that info, please let me know in the comments and I’ll update the post.