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“INTEGRATE FACEBOOK ‘LIKE’ AND GOOGLE ‘+1’ BUTTONS INTO YOUR SITE”

Google +1 is here, and it’s huge, but that fact has nothing to do with evaluating Google+ as a social network. Google has a billion people per month who search on their site. All of those results, paid and organic, are now able to be combined by Google with what we call “social endorsements”, otherwise known as those little pictures of your “friends” and an endorsement that they have‘liked’ or ‘+1’d’ some piece of content.

The takeaway is simple: implementing a ‘like’ and ‘+1’ strategy will boost your SEO rankings and even lower your PPC costs. However, it is key to understand that this is a correlation not a direct causation. Adding +1 buttons to the product pages on your eCommerce store does not cause Google to increase your organic rankings. However, as users click those +1 buttons, it causes future users connected to those users (through circles or even just as Gmail contacts) to be exposed to that social endorsement.

This increases the likelihood they click on that listing, and in turn causes Google to increase the rankings of that site because the listing is garnering (due to the social endorsement) a higher CTR than Google ‘expects’ in that position.

Many marketers have taken a ‘wait and see’ attitude towards Google+.
The smartest marketers, however, are embracing the powerful cycle of interactions we are exposing, and they are already enjoying the traffic and conversion boosts this strategy provides.

Google, for better or worse, has ‘bet the farm’ on Google+ and the extraordinary influence that social media now has in the Google search results.

Whether we agree or don’t agree with the strategy, Google’s utter dominance in search and the importance of search in any online marketing campaign requires that we too, move our bets to their horse.

Google+ profiles allow individuals and businesses to maintain a profile, post pictures, link to articles, microblog and otherwise engage in an experience that is overwhelmingly Facebook-like. Again, while we don’t think there is any debate that Facebook is in no way going to be overtaken by Google+, the extent to which Google is presently integrating these social results into the “regular” search results is astounding, and is sufficient motivation for smart businesses to invest in their Google+ profile, communication and community engagement.

We at highersitesgroup.com are more than happy to assist you in implementing these changes as part of your smartbox internet marketing and seo work.

Please contact us for details.