As a business with an online presence there are so many directions that you can go in to keep up with audience engagement and online social marketing.  Recent results published in a great infographic by Silverpop, suggest that Googe Plus has gained huge ground over previous front runners in the race for social space, beating LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest and Flickr to become the third largest online Social Network.

Google Plus hasn’t been around for long and only recently launched an option for business owners to create an online presence through Google Plus Business Pages.  After beta testing in 2011, the pages feature was officially launched to business owners in November of 2011.

The platform continues to evolve and its user base enjoys a plethora of integrated features, which are obvious advantages from a business perspective.  One thing which is clear is that this channel is important if you are a publisher, author or contributor.

Setting up a Google Plus Business page is straightforward, there are some tricks to getting the profile established and optimized correctly and we detail these in the very long post below:-

Create a Google Account (GMail)

Open a personal account in your own name.  Unfortunately at this moment  in time (January 2013) Google does not allow profiles to be set up under a business name.  The aim is to associate a business with a real person.

It’s important that this person provides the business with the recovery details and administration functions of the account.  This personal account can be purely for the use of the business and does not have to be the same account which the person uses privately.

Google does currently allow for multiple accounts in any given name. How many John Smiths are born on 13th January 1960?  It really is too difficult to police from an authenticity perspective, so this can be a pseudo account for the purpose of business use.

Your Google Plus profile welcome screen

Once you have successfully created your Personal Google account, it’s then time to create a personal Google Plus Profile.  To do this go Profile, in the left hand sidebar of your dashboard and start to add information about yourself.

As this guide is focused on creating and optimizing a Google Plus Business page, we won’t dwell on the detail of setting up your personal profile.

It is important that you make every effort to complete your profile to the fullest, add a profile picture (make sure it’s a face and not a logo) Google check to make sure that the image is of a face.

Add photos, websites, interests, links and lots of text and images to make your profile interesting.

Set Up Your Google Plus Business Page

Go to http://www.google.com/+/business/ and click on the blue “Create a Page” button to the top right of the landing page.

Google Plus Business Page

Once you click on the “Create a Page” button, you will be directed to a login page.  If you are already logged into the account which you created earlier then you will go straight to the Google Plus for Business dashboard.

Either way, please ensure that you use the correct credentials for the personal profile account as created.

Select a Category for your Google Plus Business page

When logged in to your profile, you will be presented with the Category selection page.  It is important that you decide what type of business you are creating a page for.

Select Your Business Category for G+

The category choices are as follows:-

- Local Business or Place (usually for a company which serves a local area like a restaurant)
- Product or Brand (usually for building a brand like Nike or Adidas)
- Company, Institution or Organization (most business who serve nationally or globally)
- Arts, Entertainment or Sports (for promoting music, books, TV shows etc)
- Other (for pages that do not fit into a given category)

For the purpose of this guide, we are going to select the Company category as the business page that we will be creating serves nationally and globally, rather than locally.  If we want to create specific locations later then we can do so through the Local Business or Place Category.

Choose a Sub Category for Your Page

Once you have chosen your main category, Google asks for a more specific sub category, this is where you let Google know what type of Industry you work in.

Choose your G+ Business Category

The business page that we are creating belongs to a food retailer, so we will be choosing the “Food and Beverages” sub category.

Once you have selected your category in the drop down box, click on the blue “next” button.

Choose a Name for Your G+ Business Page

You are next presented with 3 items to complete, Your Business Name, Your Website and Your Audience.  We have completed those which are appropriate to our business or brand.

Creat Your Google Plus Business Page

Once you have completed the fields as requested, click on the red “continue” button.

Set Up Your Branding and G+ Business Detail

You are now presented with a very blank and boring dashboard which is the canvas for your brand and business profile, this area represents the public profile for your Google Plus Business page.  “Make your page come alive”

Your Google + Business Dashboard

To make your page come alive you will require the following:-

Logo : This should be a PNG file which is sized to 250px x 250px.  We would recommend that the logo should have a small white border of around 20px.  Similar to that shown below:

Logo Size for Google Plus Profile

Cover Photo: This should be a PNG file which is sized to 940px x 180px.  The sizing for your cover photo is reasonably flexible and may require some adjustment before you get it exactly right.

The sizing and positioning of your image depends upon the format of your Cover Photo and where it sits when the Logo is laid over it inside the G+ Business dashboard.  See ours below:

Google Plus Cover Photo

A Description: Create a description which best describes your business and its activities, keep this fairly punchy and try not to be overly promotional.

An Email Address: Provide an email address that people can make contact with you.

and this is how it looks once we have uploaded our images and inserted our description and email details:

Completed Google Plus Business Page

…it’s a start, still a little bare and needs more work and optimization.

The About Tab

In the previous screenshot, we saw the dashboard from an admin point of view, this provided us with prompts to edit each area of the page as required.

The next step is to start to fill out and connect our business page to other social properties.  We do this by clicking on the “About” tab, which brings up a small page which details the information which we inserted previously.

The Google Plus About Tab Contains Your Business Information

On this page, you will note that there are further prompts which require us to verify the email address and to link the website which we entered in the previous step.  This confirms to Google that you own these properties and creates an authentic connection.

Verify Email: Next to the email, you will notice a link which says “Verify”, click on this link and a verification email will be sent through immediately.  When you receive this email, click on the link inside the email and you will be redirected to a confirmation page.

Link Website: Next to the URL of your website, you will notice a button which says “Link Website”, click on this link and follow the process to link your site either via Google Webmaster Tools (if previously set up) or by asking your webmaster to add a line of html code to the homepage of your website.  When this is done, the connection is made.

Once the connections have been verified, a small grey check mark will appear at the side of the properties indicating that a successful connection has been made between your Google Plus Business page and your web properties.

Adding More Links: We now need to add more web properties and social properties to our Google Plus for Business profile, to do this click on the blue “Edit Profile” link at the top of the page, you will then be presented with a slightly alternative layout which has a section at the bottom which says “Links – What Pages Interest You?”…click on this.

By clicking on the “Links – What Pages Interest You?” area, you can optimize with more outbound links

When you click on this area, you will see a pop up box which prompts you to add more web urls and names, see the image below:

By clicking on the links, you can add more social properties like Facebook pages and Twitter pages

In the example above, we have added the Business Facebook Page, using the custom label “Proper Pasty Company Official Facebook Page” and added the corresponding Facebook Page long url.

When you click on the blue “save” button, Google will recognise that this is a true Facebook url and render the Facebook logo next to your Custom Link, we then do the same for Twitter:

You can add as many custom links as you wish using this feature

You can now proceed to add any other URL that you either own or have an interest in, these may be separate Google+ Locations from your places pages, third party references, LinkedIn accounts, Twitter Accounts etc.

The more the merrier and the more value that you can offer to the viewer, the better your page will perform for your business.

Adding Photos and Videos to Your G+ Profile

When you have completed the About page and all links are in place, it’s time to start adding a little content.   If you have photos and videos that you are happy to upload to the Google Plus Business account then now’s the time to do it.

You will notice that the dashboard shows a tab for Photos and Videos, this is where you can upload more content which is associated with your business.

When you click on the Photos tab you will see that the images that you have used for your Google Plus Business logo and cover photo, already appear in the album.  You can create as many albums as you feel are necessary and start to upload photos through the normal process.

Adding phtos to your Google Plus profile is easy using the drag and drop feature

Click on the red “Upload New Photos” button to start adding more images to your Google Plus Business page.

You will be presented with an option to create a new album or to add the photo to an existing album, we are going to add food product photos to a Cornish Pasty album, so we’ll create an album called “Cornish Pasties” and then proceed to upload our images.

As you can see from the image below, we have already prepared our images and saved them with the appropriate names, which include the keywords that we would like them to be found for.

It is important when saving images for your Google Plus Business page, that you use keywords within your file name, taking care to use the appropriate name for each image rather than stuffing repeated keywords across the files.

You can upload images to your Google + profile in bulk

We have also resized all of our images to 150px x 150px to provide some uniformity for the gallery.

Next we need to drag the food images across to our new Cornish Pasties folder:

The images being to upload…

Google Plus image upload

and when they have finished uploading, we have the option to share the album with our connections (Circles)

Share your photos with people in your circles

At this moment in time we are not going to Share our album, because we have no connections or circles to share with.  At this point we will click cancel and proceed back to the dashboard.

When you return to the photos tab, you will notice that your new album does not appear.  This is because the album has not been shred and is therefore not public.  To view the album you must click on the Scrapbook Photos images which will open your Photos section where you can manage your uploaded photos.

The photos section can also be found in the left hand side of your Google Plus Business Page sidebar navigation:

The photos tab is located in the left hand sidebar

When you navigate to this section you will be presented with all of your uploaded photos and you can see in the image below that our Cornish Pasties album is showing with a red circle with a red line through it, this icon means that this album can only be seen by you.

You can share and edit albums and photographs from within this section, drilling down to various levels.

The video tab is managed in exactly the same way as the Photos tab, create albums, upload, edit and share.

Engage and Make Some Noise!

So now that your Google Plus Business page is starting to take shape, it’s time to start connecting with the world and creating buzz around your page.

There are several ways in which you can add contacts and connections to your Google Plus Business page.

When you set up your Gmail (Google) account, you may have used Google Mail or GMail to communicate to your business connections or your personal connection, or both.  When you started the process of setting up a personal profile for Google Plus you will have been prompted sometime through that process to search for and share connections within your GMail account.

If you did this, then you may already have connections through Circles, if not then we need to start by creating Circles and adding friends, acquaintances and business contacts.

Google Plus Circles

Google Plus Circles help you to organize your connections, like folders and filing cabinets for people.  They are also a great way to control how you share content and protect content, from videos and posts to photos.

Circles are associated with your whole profile, you will not create circles for your business profile separately, rather have circle which will be associated with different elements of your business.

To decide which circles best suit your business, click on the Circles link in the left and sidebar, this will open up the Circles dashboard:

Adding people to circles allows you to channel communications

As defaults, there are already Circles established for Friends, Family, Acquaintances and Following. To the left of these you will see a blank Circle which is prompting you to “Drop here or create a Circle”, when you click on this link a window will open which prompts for more information about your Circle.

This is the point where you need to decide, how to categorize your business.  You may wish to just have a Circle named “Business” which will include all of your business related contacts, but this broad group will not allow you to communicate and share in channels later on.

As an example, we are going to create a list of business related elements which may be useful in creating your Circles for Google Plus Business.

In our case, we are creating a Circle for a company who sell Cornish Pasties to retail consumers, they have many potential Circles to their business and they may wish to communicate with each Circle in a different manner, as follows:

Circles For Business (Proper Pasty Company)

• Pasty Fans (Customers, General Public, Consumers)
• Food
• Suppliers
• Staff
• Managers
• Senior Managers
• Technical Team
• Marketing

The list is endless, but for the sake of our initial Circles for Proper Pasty Company, we are going to create a Circle for “Pasty Fans” and “Food” so that we can promote and communicate via the appropriate channels.

Find people who would relate to your business circles by typing in names and keywords

When you have entered the name of your Circle, you then have the option to create an empty Circle (as detailed on the blue button) or you can start to Add People who you feel are appropriate to the Circle.

As this is a Food related business, we are going to look for Gordon Ramsay by clicking on the “Add a new person” link and then typing into the resulting search bar.  You will notice that as you start to type, Google Plus tries to find the person using predictive typing, if the string of characters matches with a person who already has a Google Plus profile, then their names will start to appear.

Google also provides us with further information to prove authenticity, as you can see in the image above, there are a number of Gordon Ramsays with Google Plus profiles and we want to make sure that we are adding THE Gordon Ramsay rather than a spoof profile.

If a profile has been verified, there will be a grey check against the name, this is an indication that the profile is authentic.  On the converse of this, not everyone verifies their profile so it is not a true measure of authenticity.

We are happy that this is Gordon Ramsay and we are going to confirm and add the person to our “Pasty Fans” Circle.  When we confirm this person, we get the following message:

When you have added someone to your Google Plus Circle, you see a summary of visibility

This lets us know what happens when we add someone to a circle.

When we click the blue button to add the person “Okay, got it”, the person appears inside our Circle and Google Plus makes further suggestions which relate to this addition, we can investigate further or we can go ahead and create the Circle with just one person:

A summary of people added to your Google Plus Circles

We then proceed to add the “Food” Circle and find people and pages that we would like to be inside our Circle.  We search for words like “Food” and “Cornwall” to find suitable additions:

So we now have two new Circles with people and pages inside them:

Ideally at this point, you will spend more time looking for individuals and pages to connect with and add to your circles.  For now we have a starting point and content will start to populate within our Google Plus Home page:

Connecting With Real People

Once we have some activity on our Home page, we need to go and look at the comments and monitor the activity, more importantly we need to get involved with the conversation and start adding people to our circles.

So, in the post first article which shows up in our feed, we see a post from the Food Network (who we added to our Food Circle), they have posted a recipe about Pizza Pockets and they have already received 103 comments.

Here’s the process:

• Click on the +1 button (hit as many of these as you choose, be critical!)
• Hover over the people who are commenting and Add them to one of your circles
• Hover over the people who are commenting and Add them to one of your circles
• Hover over the people who are commenting and Add them to one of your circles
• … keep this up and make it an everyday routine
• Most of these people will Add you back and you will appear in their G+ feeds

What we are doing here is adding people who have an interest in Food to our Google Plus Circles, we need to build up a healthy amount of people…just like creating an email marketing list with segments!

When you hover over the profile of the person making the comment, you will be able to Add them and tag them to a circle, see this in the image below.

In addition, we suggest that you engage in the comments too, really engage and add value and more reference, offer advice and become a valuable member of the group.  This way you will also start to build your own following.

Important!  Don’t use the Google Plus channel to overly promote your content and products, go in lightly, introduce yourself, join in the conversation and then make suggestions which draw people to your brand or product.

Google Plus profiles are the start of authenticity, acting as a hub which connects to all of your web properties and social networks, the Google graph will understand more about individuals and who they connect to in an attempt to stamp out pseudo web spam activity.

Google Plus Cures The Problem

For the last 15 years or so, it has been possible for any individual to create web content which claims to be the authority on a given subject and to contaminate Googles index with web spam which potentially serves as a risk to its users.

Controlling this problem has been a problem, as with any algorithm it can be reverse engineered and “gamed” for profit or devilment.

Learning from the Facebook Graph

Over the years, since its inception in 2004, Facebook created associations between “real” people and began graphing (or indexing) the networks that were created via friends, communities, places, likes and comments within its framework.

The Facebook graph is difficult to “Game” mainly due to the authenticity of the relationships which have been cultivated through social connections.  The nature of the Facebook portal is that it allows families and friends to connect, share, communicate and express interest (Like) any variety of media, products, personality and subject.  This innocent and entertaining activity has developed over te years and has evolved into a more authentic model than Google can offer…at the moment.

Google Plus Profile

Googles answer to authenticity lies within the careful development of Google Plus.  Individuals are required to create personal profiles from which they can anchor any other business, place, website or social connection.  The authenticity is still not 100% bulletproof as anyone can create any number of G+ profiles without a robust method of verification.

Googles initial goal is to ensure that content which it serves and indexes, is associated with an authority / author profile, thus taking the level of authenticity a step closer towards robust.  Web pages are Googles life blood, without web pages Google doesn’t have a product, so it is vital that trusted web pages can be served to its users.

Google Authorship

Content which is served on web pages can now be attributed to an author by way of a circular connection.  This connection lies within a linking relationship between a Google Plus profile page, a Web Page, a related Bio Page, a Gravatar and an email address which is associated with the root domain of the website which is publishing the content.

Setting Up Google Authorship

The following steps  outline the process:

1. Set up an account at Google as usual
2. Establish a Google+ Profile
3. On your website create a page which represents your Bio or Profile, your profile url will be in the format http://www.site.com/bio/user
4. On Google+ click on your Profile icon then click the Edit Profile button then click in the “Contributor To” section and add a link to your Bio page (from 3 above)
5. Verify your posts on your site by pasting the respective URLs into the Rich Snippets Testing Tool.
6. Google uses rich snippets to render author data within its search engine results, this in turn adds credibility and profile to the SERPs.
7. When you have successfully tested the rich snippets in webmaster tools you are ready to proceed with content creation.

Google Places allows you to add upto 5 categories for your business listing, but insists that the first category is taken from a list of preset business profiles.

This has been a constant source of frustration for many SEO agencies and local business owners, mainly because Google fails to provide you with visibility of what categories are available. In addition to this, Google doesn’t seem to list all business types when it attempts to predict what you are typing into the category field.

It takes a third party Google Places expert to research these categories and to produce a publicly available list to help Google to get it right…why it makes this task so difficult is truly a mystery and a frustration.

Mike Blumenthal of “Blumenthals.com” kindly went to the huge effort of creating a list of categories for Google Places categories so that local businesses can decide their best match before Optimizing their listing in the Google Places dashboard.

Not only did Mike and the team go to the trouble of creating a detailed list, they also went as far as internationalizing the structures so that business owners in the UK, USA, Canada, Ireland, Australia and Hong Kong etc can select the category relating to their local dialect.

Check out this awesome resource here and take the pain out of Category Roulette in Google Places.

I would also recommend the you click on your locality first (detailed in the hyperlinks) and then search using a blank query field, this will produce a full list of categories with semantically related terms which are further useful for Google Places Optimization.

Anyone who watches the SEO and Social space online will know that Google has been making every attempt to render search results from authentic entities, whether these are people or places. The advent of Google Plus and Google Places (previously Google Local) was a move to deliver authenticity in it’s search engine results pages (SERPs).

These Google products, forced website owners to prove that they were real and that they had a physical business address, this evolved so that real people could then rate real businesses which had a real location…the connections were all in the name of authenticity.

Previously, any snot nose kid could create pseudonyms on his laptop, whilst in his underpants, from his own bedroom and pass off as an expert in Wart Removal, Marriage Guidance or Mesothelioma. These fictitious online entities were previously able to game the search engine and hit top rankings for any number of search terms in an attempt to prize money from an innocent victim. So Google changed all that and created a social connection which goes some way to challenging authenticity.

Facebook just took a huge leap ahead in the race for search trust by launching a beta of its new Graph Search. Graph Search is in its infancy, currently allowing a select few users to search for limited elements within a users connected network of friends, this will include places, photos and interests.

Ultimately, the Facebook Graph Search development will roll out to include almost limitless authentic and trusted search ability, which will be unrivalled and almost unbeatable. the connections between places, products, brands and images has already been made via the Facebook Like button, the Like Link network will become a phenomenally powerful feature of Facebook Graph Search.

Graph Search will undoubtedly be a huge monetization strategy for Facebook and will be a serious challenger to other paid advertising platforms like Google Adwords and Bing Adcenter.

The most exciting opportunity for Facebook Graph Search is in mobile marketing and mobile search, imagine the possibilities from a marketing perspective for local businesses who have established Facebook Pages and have a community with a conversation going on…watch this space, this is a game changer beyond our wildest imaginations!

Geographical locations are playing a very big part in local business optimization and the closer you are to the center of your City, the better your chances of appearing at the top of the maps listings.  Not sure that this is a true indicator of being the most relevant and trusted business in the area, but this is certainly a factor in the local seo algorithm.

There are a number of things that you need to pay attention to when setting up your local business listing in your Google account:-

1. Use the location name in your content, paying particular attention to the usual on page suspects, Title Tag, H1 Tag, Link Text (anchor text inn content) and be sure to pair this up with your service or trade.  For example – “Dentist in New York” or “Plumber in San Diego”, get them in the Title Tags and content as early as seem practical.
2. Add a Google Map to your page wherever possible, use Google Maps to find your location and then us the embed code to render it on your page.  Make sure that you locate the marker pin as accurately as possible.
3. Add your business name and address to your contacts page, together with a Local telephone number, the more that your content confirms that you are an authentic local business, the more chance you have of hitting the top spots of the local listings.  Using genuine local telephone numbers reaffirm to Google that you are a local business.
4. Remember the exact format that you  for your address and telephone numbers, Google looks for exact match citations on local directories such as Yell.com and Yelp.com which reinforce your local authenticity.
5. Once you have completed the on page local SEO optimization as suggested above, you are ready to proceed with your Google Places listing.

Whilst this list of 5 points may seem to be obvious to most SEO experts, you’d be surprised how many of these Local SEO elements are quite often ignored or overlooked!

One mistake a lot of webmasters make with SEO is to assume that the one keyword which is most relevant to their site is necessarily the best one to optimize all of their content for. While this isn’t inherently wrong and certainly this keyword should be used where possible, it’s definitely not the case that this approach is going to yield results any time soon. This leap of logic leads many webmasters to neglect to perform adequate keyword research and as a result, they fail to help their site’s page rank.

Suppose that you have a website about clocks. Instinctively, you’d want to optimize your content for the keyword “clocks” or “clock”. Again, there’s nothing wrong with this, but there are a few things you should think about before assuming that this is all you need to do. First, these kinds of keywords are often too broad, especially if your website is selling something. Second, these keywords are very common search terms – meaning that you’ll have quite an uphill battle in front of you if you want to rank in the first page (or ten) for these keywords.

Obviously, you’re going to need to be more specific if you want to make your SEO a success. This is where keyword research comes in; there are some excellent tools out there for this purpose, both free and commercially available. Google offers a free keyword research tool which many feel to be among the best – though there are certainly a great number of choices for webmasters to explore.

What these tools can do for you is to show you how many searches a given keyword or phrase receives. This is in itself very valuable data, but a keyword research tool can show you something else which is at least as important: the degree of competition for these keywords. This can show you whether you’re better off using (as per our example above) “clocks” or a more specific keyword which will have a higher chance of attracting the visitors you’re trying to reach, such as “Bavarian cuckoo clocks”.

Longer and more specific keywords tend to be searched somewhat less often than single-word keywords, but the degree of competition is also far lower. The idea of keyword research is to find keywords which are searched often enough to be worth the trouble of optimizing your content for, yet not so competitive that you won’t have a chance to rank highly for these words and phrases.

SEO is an abbreviated form of the phrase search engine optimization. SEO is something of an umbrella term, referring to any of a number of techniques which are intended to make websites easier for people to find via Google and other search engines. Since the vast majority of web users use search engines to find whatever it is they’re looking for online, having your website show up as high as possible in the list of search results provided by the search engines is everything in terms of bringing visitors into your site.

Most people (and this probably includes those of you reading this right now) don’t look past the first page or two of search results – perhaps three at most. It’s rare that anyone digs deeper into the search results than this, which is why SEO is so important to the success of your site. If yours is a business oriented site, then coming to grips with search engine optimization is an absolute must. Even if you have a purely personal site, it’s still a good idea to implement some SEO techniques unless you really don’t care if anyone visits your site.

The basis of most SEO techniques is keywords – these are the search terms that people enter into search engines when they’re looking for something; and using the right keywords in the right places in your website’s content and in the HTML code (namely, the meta tags for your site) does a couple of very important things. First, this tells the search engines what your site is about. Secondly, using the right keywords tells the search engines that your site is relevant to these terms and should be included in the results for searches which use these terms.

You’ll often get the best results from your SEO efforts by using what are called long tail keywords; these are longer phrases which tend to be more specific. For instance, “Swiss chocolate with caramel” instead of simply “chocolate”. You’ll want to do some research on different keywords to find out which ones you may want to use for your own site.

Other than the use of keywords and phrases, there are other methods of improving your page ranking in the search engines which fall under the umbrella of SEO, most notably link building. Search engines use a variety of different criteria to evaluate the relevance and importance of websites – one of which is the number of links from other sites which point to your own.

There is a lot more to SEO than there’s room to discuss here today, but these are the basics which you’ll need to know to get off to a good start – and get your website climbing up the page rankings to become more visible, get more visitors and if you’re selling something, increase sales.