Create Google+ Buzz

Just a quick little post today but don’t be fooled by its size.  There are some great tips here!

Whether you hopped onto Google+ because of the Publisher/Authorship tags or because you heard it’s important for the future of your site, you are there now and it’s time to take action!  Once you’ve got your profile completed and you are rocking an awesome picture and cover photo, what do you do next?

Start by crafting some kick-butt content that you can share online. Typically I suggest posting it on your Blog and then linking to it in a little excerpt on Google+.

Here is a collection of other tips to get you generating some G+ buzz.

• Engage by commenting.  Commenting on other people’s posts is a great way to start conversations and get to know people. Once you’ve built relationships, people are more likely to share your content.
• Find relevant Communities and post your content there (assuming it’s allowed within the Community, be sure to follow their guidelines).
• Optimize title tags of posts.  The first sentence of each post becomes the post’s title tag, which is one of the most important ranking factors and has a large impact on click-through-rate. Just like when you are writing headlines, you want to make sure the title of the post is intriguing and therefore likely to get clicked on. Typically, next sentence of the post is usually what displays as the Meta Description in the search results page.  Ensure you put the most relevant keywords and more compelling content there.
• Much like on Facebook, using eye-catching photos along with a link to your content is helpful.  You’ll get more attention and interest.
• Shout out to other users on G+ when you’ve referenced them in your post or content, that will notify them they’ve been mentioned and they are more likely to check out and share your post.
• Hangout with your customers! Google’s Hangout allows you to get face-to-face with your followers and have a conversation with them in real-time.
• Search for relevant hashtags, share the posts you find and comment on them, this will help you reach people outside your current network that are talking about the same things you are.
• Ask for help!  People are inherently helpful on social media.  If you reach out and ask for help or information in a certain area, you are likely to get a lot of responses and this allows you to connect with those people that reply.

In addition to building your Authority status on G+, there is another benefit.  Google crawls and indexes G+ posts so quickly these days.  They follow all links in the posts through to the site, so linking to your new pages ensures the spiders will follow the links and spider your site more frequently. There is definitely a proven correlation between faster indexing of your site pages and frequent G+ posts.