With every month passing by, Google changes its SEO strategies slightly.  There’s always something new you can do in order to optimize your site a little better.  Google+ is becoming a stronger player in SEO.

Why?  Google is slowly increasing the SEO value social sites pass.  It’s not essential to be active on social sites yet, but it may be in the years ahead.

Additionally, Google+ is experiencing insanely rapid growth.  Because of Google’s already-established reputation, Google+ is expected to have around 500 million users by the end of 2012 (compared to 1 billion for Facebook), which is astonishing, given the platform was launched in summer of 2011.

With all of that background information in mind, you can now see why optimizing your Google+ profile is important to do.  Even better is the fact that none of it is hard to do at all.

The 6 Simple Tips

1. Build a link to your website from your profile.  You can easily insert a link with the anchor text of your own choosing from your Google+ profile.  Keep in mind, that if people regularly engage with you on your profile, share your posts, or that link directly to your profile, the value that link passes to your site increases.
2. Place links in your posts.  But be careful not to get carried away!  If you do a link for every post, Google gets somewhat ornery.  It wants what it calls “natural” links.  The best way to think about natural links is this:  think about relevant content you can offer your followers, and if a link to your site fits in, then post it.
3. Your new content is indexed fast.  Depending on the site, Google can take a couple weeks, or even up to a month, before your content is added to its search index.  No one knows the specifics for Google+, but people have witnessed content posted to Google+ has been indexed almost instantly.  In any case, Google’s goal with the platform is to compete with other social media sites, so why wouldn’t content here post any faster?
4. Use it.  Currently, 1 out of 4 people who use Google+ once per month.  This number is increasing, but the general point is that by being active and posting valuable content for your audience, you are immediately putting yourself at an advantage.
5. Optimize your profile picture for conversions.  Test out different profile pictures.  Make sure to track the click-through-rates from your profile to your website in Google Analytics.  Eventually, you’ll land on one that outperforms all of the others.
6. Edit your posts as needed…anytime.  At Facebook, you have a limited amount of time to edit your posts.  At Twitter, you can never edit them, only delete them.  If you put out a post and think it should succeed, but the post hasn’t done so, you can edit just about everything about it.  Typically the headline is the best place to start, as that’s what appears in the SERPs.

If You Have Time, Do It

Any SEO value you can pass your own site helps, so the moral of the story is:  if you have time available do it.  Who knows, your next post could go viral and attract extensive attention.