Bolster Your Google+ Profile

Michael Bergbauer - May 9, 2013

For most people, putting time into meticulously crafting all the elements of a social media profile is a task that only falls into the purview of a full-fledged social media campaign. However, as Google+ has gained steam, the impact of profile pages have expanded.

This is mostly because of AuthorRank – an unverified ranking signal that bears resemblance to PageRank, except that it measures the authority and influence of an individual author, rather than that of an entire website. Similar to increasing your PageRank for SEO purposes, there are advantages to increasing your AuthorRank.

One of the key methods for increasing your AuthorRank is optimizing your Google+ page. Originally, tying your content back to your Google+ profile was simply a means of establishing AuthorRank for yourself. However, as the signal has grown in complexity, even more factors of AuthorRank are tied to Google+. The stronger your Google+ profile, the better your Author Rank. As you go about crafting your Google+ profile, keep these points in mind:

• The “About” section: Keywords and hyperlinks placed in your About section can play an important role in your profile’s search ranking. Try to use relevant keywords in your Story, Work, and Education sections. Also, don’t forget that you can use HTML in these sections to create hyperlinks that are optimized with appropriate keywords. Take note though, that URLs displayed under the Links section of your profile are no-follow links. While it may seem like that section is meant to optimize your top links, it’s not very useful for that task.

• Build big circles: While the number of users in your circles does not directly affect ranking factors for your profile, it is still important to have lots of users. When more people link back to your profile and posts, that’s the number that helps Google sit up and take notice.

• Optimize your posts: You can give your Google+ posts titles by putting an asterisk at the beginning and end of the first sentence. Just like in HTML titles, keywords play an important role in post titles. Also, make sure to place URL’s in the link section. If they are placed in the body of the post, they will become no-follow links.

• Consistent use: A consistently updated website has much better ranking potential than a stale, static one – that’s why we recommend blog writing to so many of our clients. Consistent updates to your Google+ page have a similar effect; not to mention that new posts are new opportunities to strengthen some of the above points.

By focusing more effort toward optimizing your Google+ profile, you’ll be able to increase your relevance with Google as a web-author. The initial set-up may be a bit time consuming, but once it’s done the content you produce will be able to reach an even wider audience.