Google makes it easier to link your website to your Google+ page

Whether you like it or not, Google is going all the way with this Google+ thing. The way the service has been rolled out and integrated into all of its products clearly shows that it’s not just another social network.

With the addition of business pages by way of Google+ Local, more brands are getting their own Google+ presences in order. Google has released a new feature today which helps you link your website to your Google+ page.

Here’s what Google’s Dennis Troper had to say about it:

When you link your website to your Google+ page, your recent posts can appear in lots of relevant places across Google. For example: when users search for your brand, an excerpt from a recent Google+ post may appear to the right of search results.

Today we’re rolling out an improvement that makes the linking process a lot easier for page owners. In fact: you can complete the process in just a few simple steps:

1) Visit your Google+ page, open its profile, and click ‘Edit profile’
2) On the About tab, save your website URL, then click the new button, ‘Link website’
3) Follow the instructions for adding a short line of code to your website’s homepage, then click ‘Test website’

If everything’s set up correctly, you’ll see a confirmation message. Within a day or two, the link between your website and your Google+ page will be active, and a check icon will appear next to your URL on your profile (see screenshots).

By setting this up on your website, you’ll notice that the links to your Google+ page will start showing up in the Knowledge Graph section of Google search results:

This serves as an “official” link to your Google+ Page, so that people who are hunting around for your brand know that it’s official. A checkmark will also show up on your Google+ page next to the link that you’ve inserted the code into:

With these 3 easy steps, you can take all of the guess work out of Google’s attempt to include all of the important details about you and your company into its search results.