Badges! We don’t need no stinking badges! ….ok, we yell we do. But it is hard not to take the opportunity to corrupt a perfectly good movie line. Badges are the little icons on a website that link back to a Google Plus page. One of the key elements to getting the most from your G+ SEO is making sure that you website and your profile/page are linked.
2 Types of Links
There are 2 ways to link your G+ on your website. The traditional badge which links directly to your G+ page, or by adding a plus button to your posts. You should do both.
The simple badge just lets people easily find your G+ page. But that does not boost your content sharing. Plus, you need to have a Google Plus page. The plus button lets you give your readers the opportunity to plus your post or page regardless of you having a G+ page/profile. The plus button simply registers a link with G+ and submits it to their database. Once a post has been plused it can now be searched inside the social network.
Here are some simple plugins for your website or blog you can use to add the plus button:
Google Plusone(+1) Button- simple button but has some features to customize.
WP PlusOne This - simple plug and play. Just install and it is ready to go.
To add a badge, you need to add it like you would an image and then simply link the image. But of course there is a trick. When you grab the URL from your Google Plus profile you get a very long link
https://plus.google.com/114527180389797729264/posts
But here’s what the link must look like.
https://plus.google.com/114527180389797729264
Simply remove anything after the number. That number is your profile ID. The clean link ID will not only help with your SEO but will also help with establishing authorship and getting your profile verified. … and yes I will be talking about both of these things in a later post.
Linking
It is not enough to link your website to your Google Plus, you also need to link your Google Plus to your webpage. This is very simple.
Click on your profile and click edit. In the links section click “add custom link” then put in your link URL and title.
