I bet you’re like the vast majority of people, you pretty much never use your Google + account. With more popular social networks like Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter, why would you? The original concept of a SOCIAL NETWORK was to be social. If your friends are on Facebook, your colleagues are on Linkedin, and your favorite celebrities are on Twitter, and no one is on Google +, then why would you want to be there? Well, because if you’re reading my blog, you’re most likely a web developer, and your friends on Facebook aren’t. Google + isn’t just some small side project that Google decided to launch on a whim. Mark my word, G+ will be the most popular social network within a few years. Now before you think I’m some Google spokes person, I need to say that I personally don’t really like G+. There are a lot of reasons that I’m not going to get into, but the main one is that I just think its a little too confusing for most people to use. They’ve really blurred the lines between email contacts, followers, circles, pages, communities, and youtube subscribers, as well as your own personal username. But this article is about why you SHOULD use G+.

SEO

You probably know what SEO is, and if you don’t, then you should… GOOGLE it and find out. Lets think about this logically for a second. To see a persons Facebook post, you need to be logged into Facebook, and depending on that persons privacy setting, you probably also need to be a friend of that person. If you write a really great informational post on Facebook, sure your friends will see it, but Google probably won’t. How do you expect Google to be able to crawl private information, then index it, then show it in their results page? They can’t! What if you made the same post on G+? Now your friends probably won’t see it, but Google will, in fact, they’ll see it instantly. There’s no wait time for your information to be crawled, its right there immediately. Lets go a step further. What if you post a link to your website on your G+ account VS. on your Facebook? On G+, that post will be seen right away, and from what all reputable SEO’s are saying, those links get indexed right away as well. Do you think you’ll get that same priority from a Facebook post? NO!

Why Else Will It Get More Popular?

Google is putting their full force behind the G+ push. A survey of top industry SEO’s revealed that G+1’s are the #1 single ranking factor in Google Search. That doesn’t mean that link building is dead, it does still come in a close second. The huge advantage here is that right now, everybody is set on these link building campaigns, but no one is doing G+ campaigns. The market is wide open and easy to get started in.

Right now, on every website you see all these social links on every page. Its all over the place, and yes, you typically do see the G+ mixed in there, but usually it’s not prioritized. As more developers and SEO’s adapt to this trend, they’ll be pushing the G+ more. And what happens then? Well if you start seeing more of a G+ push, people will become more active with their accounts. Soon, you’ll see websites using a G+ login as the only option.

Recently, Google made the decision to require people to be logged in to their G+ accounts if they want to post a comment on youtube. This is just example of how Google will continue to be pushing G+ usage. As a web developer you’re probably already logged in for one of Google’s other services, whether its your Analytics account, Adwords, Adsense, Gmail, Webmasters, or whatever.

G+ is only one piece of of Google’s massive online presence which is leading us towards a unified login system. Their phase is “One Account. All of Google.” So get started with your Google + account today and add me to your circles! I’m sure you have an account, and if not, GO GET ONE.