Creating a Google Plus page

The other day I was reading a blog and went on to read the comments where someone wrote, “What is Google Plus?”. I had a good chuckle and I must admit, I haven’t too active on Google Plus and I’ve hardly explored the platform, well, that was until last week when I started to realise just how important Google Plus was. See, MySpace arrived and everyone had an account, LinkedIn arrived and everyone had an account, Facebook arrived and everyone had an account, Twitter arrived and everyone had an account, About.me arrived and everyone had an account.. so the list goes on, so the management gets more and more involved, so the free time vanishes. Then Google rolled out Google Plus, people jumped on because Google has Klout, but there wasn’t anything really exciting enough to keep people plugged in – I do believe that I don’t speak alone on this.

Well, things are changing and Google Plus might not be for everyone, but if you’ve got a website or sell a service online or anything to that nature the tables are about to turn. Remember when Google started showing Twitter and Facebook stuff in the search results? You might not, but they certainly did, I can’t help but think that this was purely a trial to see what social search was capable of, and this further fueled Google to put together Google Plus, remove Twitter and Facebook (to an extent) and start including Google Plus discussions in the search results – doesn’t take rocket science to really see the plan here.

So, Google’s the search giant and people want current information these days, so what better than for Google to include Google Plus conversations in the results? I mean, Google then starts to dominate the search market even more and takes a big chunk of real-time search with them – brilliant.

But what does that mean for topics like SEO? I’m not going to attempt to answer this in detail purely because it’s been answered here by Rand Fishkin, Joost de Valk, Marcus Taylor, Aaron Wall and Jorg Ruis, who are all industry leaders with excellent insight. Instead, I’m going to tell you that now is a really good time to get yourself a Google Plus Page for your business, just think, if you create that page and get some great content onto it, you’ll have an edge over your competitors for a good while – of course, there’s a strategy for creating good content and you might have to hire an SEO to assist you with aligning your Google goodies – organic SEO stuff, Google Places, Google Plus Page, etc as they can all work so beautifully together and I’d recommend doing that, but you can at least make a start and I’m going to assist you in doing so:

1. To start creating a Google Plus page you need to navigate to http://plus.google.com/pages/create in your browser.
2. Select a category which best describes your business: local business or place, product or brand, company, institution or organization, arts entertainment or sports and finally other.
3. Fill in the information that appears in the form on the right as accurately as possible (remember, Google loves the truth, don’t try cheat the system).
4. Click the CREATE button
5. Your page will be created, you can now add a tagline and profile photograph (or logo).
6. Share your page with your circles if you wish
7. Click FINISH

7 easy steps and you’ll have a Google Plus Page, fresh and ready for new content that will start being indexed by Google any day now and this is how you’re going to get ahead of your competitors.

This is really the direction in which things are moving at the moment in my opinion, I’d jump on and get going right away :)