How to add Google Plus to your website

How to add the new Google Plus button to your website.

What is Google Plus?
Google Plus is Googles’s latest foray into the social network world, they have made attempts in the past with Buzz and Wave, but they never really took off. If the talk from the beta testers and the early reviews is correct, they may finally have cracked it, and created if not a Facebook killer then at the very least an application that will take some of Facebook’s market share.

Google Plus in lots of ways is similar to Facebook, users can personalise lists of friends and stream news feeds, but there are a few key differences & features.

  • A +1 button is now displayed next to all your search results in Google; this allows you to recommend pages easily to your friends.When your friend sees one of your recommend sites in the search results it will show that your have recommended it. Recommend pages will start to appear higher in the results for your friends and eventually sites will lots of recommendations will start to move up the rankings.
  • Google Plus allows you set up and put people into circles of friends. People in the circles can only see the comments and content that is allowed in that circle.
  • It is integrated into all your other Google accounts, so you can easily pull items in from Picasso or Youtube.
  • The SPARKS part of Google Plus integrates a feature similar to twitter.
  • HANGOUT – allows you to pull users together for a group video chat.

Why would you want to put a Plus Button on your site!
Google have already stated that the recommendations produced by the Plus 1 button will start to affect the search engine rankings of your site. E.g. Sites that have lots of plus 1’s will spear higher in the rankings that sites with few or none.

How to add it to your website?
If it is very easy to add a Plus 1 button, just copy and paste the code below into your website.

Place the code below in your header or just before your close body tag.
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js”></script&gt;

Place the code below at the point you would like the button to be.

  • Standard Button –<g:plusone></g:plusone>
  • Small Button – <g:plusone size=”small”></g:plusone>
  • Medium Button – <g:plusone size=”medium”></g:plusone>
  • Tall Button – <g:plusone size=”tall”></g:plusone>

If you want to link to a different page use the code below. – Just replace the “http://www.example.com/blog” with the webpage’s address.
<g:plusone href=”http://www.example.com/blog”></g:plusone&gt;