Social Media + Search Engine = Google +1

Google’s latest social media integration, “Plus 1″, has really made quite a stir in the internet marketing and blogging communities. It has more in-depth social circles, where you can evolve your groups into more complicated networks utilizing specific emails and Google accounts, for friends, family, co-workers, and your weird hobby friends.

Will it replace Facebook?

No, but it will be another tool for users to interact and incorporate more search with their social media needs.

For the past few years no company has been able to grow any social media site, even close, to Facebooks massive user power and majority market domination.  The long standing history between FB and their users has developed too deep of relationships for users to break away completely.  Google Plus may take up a percentage of social media hours that a online user may apply, but Facebook will not be taken out of the equation.  People have a lot of memories on Facebook, literally millions of massive databases of media, including photos that people do not want to transfer or lose.

What does Google Plus look like?

• Posts, Videos, Google Buzz, +1′s off websites are all incorporated
• Social circles for networking friends/family etc
• Has following/followers similar to tweets
• Strong search functions for finding people/places/companies on Google Plus

My Google Plus:

Social media “circles” improves relationship and content management through your friends, family and contacts.  You can set up this circles and add/delete people as you wish, helping you organize specific content and personal/business differences.  I really love how they set this up and you can see a lot of the Google, “original” thought type of manipulation placed into the software.  Really comes off very clean and user friendly.

Google Plus and SEO:

There’s no doubt that Google Plus will play an increasingly important role for search engine optimization in 2012.  The vast majority of search engine users are from Google, Google wants more social media attention, we all must now use Google Plus.  Simple as that.

Now as to WHY and HOW Google Plus will help, that’s a lot like utilizing Facebook or LinkedIn for your SEO and internet marketing strategies.  Business and personal pages, incorporating back links(form of links and +1′s) per each user, and also a lot of content adding ability.  Allowing you to make posts and establish feeds similar to Facebook’s platform.   Here companies can create fan groups and separate corporate or employee groups for content management and distribution.   There will be a lot of people joining Google Plus this year and by 2012 any market will have thousands of users optimized for marketing in Google Plus and there, I will assume, ad-words integration.

Ad-words and Google Plus? Social media, demographic focused ads to compete with Facebook? Better believe it!

We know that the incorporation of ad-words and Google Plus could bring a massive addition to their PPC campaign opportunities.  No matter what your service or product is, allowing you to build pay-per-click campaigns for search results AND social media, would be the next level of online marketing.  Many companies love the fact that Facebook PPC enables you more possibilities at targeting demographics based on age, location, and more.  That added integration on top of the already strong and highly successful search engine rankings advertisements, Google will be at the top of paid search marketing.

When would this happen?

That’s a bit more difficult to say, currently Google has not fully announced much about Google Plus and whether they will be incorporating ad-sense in the future, or not.  As an SEO we need to plan for the possibility and make sure we understand how to best utilize the Google +1 platform upon full release.

SEO and Google SERP +1′s for a Site:

• There are some positive signs through SEO experiments that the more +1′s you receive, you do receive an increase in ranking weight
• Very minimal, but does seem to help in “recent” and “time sensitive” search engine rankings
• I do not see any negative influences currently with incorporating +1 to your domain
• Stay away from black hat manipulation, Google will severely penalize

For right now, Google’s +1 is a mandatory addition to most websites.  It’s great if you can get onto Google Plus and start building relationships and networking, I just uploaded mine so I’m looking into networking out over the next few weeks.  There may be reason to lose some Facebook time, but Google Plus isn’t going to dominate the personal social media scene.  Now for your professionals, especially any internet marketers, get on the bandwagon and start networking. ..  It is Google’s new social media, you must use it!