4. Improved Click-Through Rates
The fourth major factor here, which is an often forgotten attribute to SEO success, is click-through rate, or how often people who see you on their results page actually click on your page in the results.
One of the powerful ideas behind the +1 votes is that if you can see that certain results are extremely popular, or that people found a specific resource particularly helpful, you have that information available without even clicking into the site.
You can see how many people have already found a certain page useful before you ever click or read any other details about it. This is similar to what Twitter and Facebook have given us access to with some of their customized buttons that reveal numbers of times something has been shared.
It's still very early but some of the testing I've tried unearthed interesting data around social sharing.
I'd suggest there's a powerful "first post" effect that marketers can leverage. In other words, people might be more willing to share a piece of content if they have a chance to be one of the first people to spread the word. In any case, now Google+ gives us more opportunities to speculate about social proof and its effect on social and viral behaviour online.
The access to this insight will strongly encourage searchers to click on specific "good" pages and ignore ones that are not as popular with their readers. If you'd like to see an example of how this can work, look at your Google Webmaster Tools dashboard. Google provides a chart to show your click-through rate with and without +1 results in the search results.
For example, in the diagram from Google below, you can see that people who saw a page in the search results with +1 information next to the website's homepage were substantially more likely to click on our link. This is great reinforcement for us to place +1 buttons across our site, so that all of our pages can take advantage of the improved click-through rate!
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As you can see, Google+ is not just like any social network out there. It has the power to affect our search habits, and the search engine giant is not afraid to use that to its advantage to penetrate the social media space.
While here we covered most of the important ways in which Google+ will affect search results, there is one more element that needs to be discussed. With the launch of Google+ Business Pages, Google also rolled out an interesting new integration between Google+ and Google search. The name of this integration is Direct Connect, and in the next section, we will discuss what it does and how to set it up.
5. Direct Connect +
How to Set Up Google+ Direct Connect
Google have added a feature to Google search in which adding a '+' when searching for a brand will bring up their Google+ business profile. This doesn't yet work for all pages and so might take a while to become fully functional.
Users who want to find a company's Google+ page can now simply add a "+" in front of the company name in Google.com search to go directly to a company's Google+ Page and skip over the traditional search engine results page.
In order to enable this awesome new "+" search operator to work for your business, you first need to install the Google+ Direct Connect code on your business' website to help verify that your Google+ page is the "official" page for your business.
To do this, go to your Google+ page, and click the "connect your website" link under the "Get Started" section. Once you have done this, you will be taken to a screen that gives you options for six different Google+ buttons.
One of your options is also to display no button and just install the Google+ Direct Connect code on your website. That said, don't you want people to connect with you on Google+? So go ahead and use one of the buttons to turn website visitors into Google+ Page subscribers!
Once you add the code to your website, you will be eligible to be included in Google Direct Connect.
But keep in mind that this doesn't happen automatically. Google has stated it will be using an algorithm to determine which companies get included.
Make sure you are promoting your Google+ Page on your website, blog, and other properties off of Google+ in an effort to help influence the Direct Connect algorithm and get your business listed.
Best regards
M.T
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