Google+ for SEO

I have been reading a few articles about G+ today and thought I would compile this little handy guide to help everyone out.

The guys at the big G have said on more than one occasion that “Google+ is Google.” And now that business pages are open, Google is telling us that G+ is imperative for SEO. Let's look at a few ways G+ can help your SEO efforts.

1) Google ranks G+ posts in its search results quickly, often on the first page of results too.
2) Google introduced a new search method called Direct Connect, which lets surfers enter a + with the page they are looking for to get G+ pages directly
3) Google has also said that it is focusing on 'freshness' in its results. G+ updates tend to be recent, and can be very rich in content, depending on how much you put into them.
4) Google is loving social media recently. G+ updates can quickly get social with sharing and conversations.
5) G+ is Google's answer to Twitter, and with more and more surfers opting for near real time search (past hour, past 24 hours, etc), G+ results will no doubt rank high in SERPs.
6) authorship markup is a new html tag that lets authors tell the world that this site is theirs, those markups work brilliantly with linkbacks to G+ pages. Google also recently added circle counts and comments to authorship.

And finally, Google+ Trending Topics and Google Real-time Search were released on Friday. Its pretty much the same as Twitter, using the # tag for trending topics and using G+ for real time search results. Here's a little video about these two new releases.