Adding Google Plus “G+” to your website

Late in June, Google launched Google+, a service focused on the social/sharing aspect of the web and an attempt to grab some of Facebook’s market which currently claims over 750 million users. Google+ launched by invitation only to a limited audience, but within 4 weeks the service acquired 25 million users, a far cry from Facebook’s numbers but certainly impressive considering its immaturity. So why have website administrators rushed to add the Google+ icon to their pages?

Google is quite simply the most important search engine for most websites. And although traditionally Google results were driven by content (data) and how other sites rate that data, sharing may end up being a big part of how they rank and sort websites. In other words, website administrators, or anyone outside the Google circle for that matter, don’t know how Google+ will affect page rank and so adding the button is more or less insurance.

One of the coolest things about Google+ (also referred to as “Google Plus” and “G+”) is the “Circles” feature. Circles allow you to organize your contacts into different categories such as friends, business, family, etc. and so anything private will be only accessible by those you let into the circle. “Hangouts” is another G+ feature that enables group video chat, but the groups are currently limited to 10 people. There are several other features in Google+ you might want to check out.

For now, Google+ is in “limited Field Trial” and so the Google Plus home page is only accessible by some. For now, you might want to get Google+ button added to your page with the hopes the more “likes” you have the more traffic to your site.

Here’s a link to adding the +1 button, and here’s a link to the various +1 buttons sizes you can make use of.