Google+ is one of the newest social media concepts available to business owners, but it’s also one of the most efficient and beneficial. Rather than act as a social media site, it acts as a layer of social media placed upon everything you do online, particularly Google-based tasks. It also helps you find link-building opportunities by connecting you to blogs and other business correlates.

Find Blogs

One thing you can use Google+ for as it relates to link building is to find blogs that you can comment on. By finding great blogs to comment on and leaving useful feedback, your signature, which should have a link to your site or blog, will be able to link back to your page. This is not only a great way to become more visible in the blogosphere related to your industry, but to build links, as well. When you do comment, however, don’t self-promote. Your link should be in your signature line as though you were sending an email. Once you start to self-promote to blatantly on other people’s blogs, you’ll get a bad reputation, nobody will click on the links, and it’s seen as a cheap way of building links by search engines, so your SEO may suffer if it’s done too prolifically. Just post a helpful update and link to your site through a signature.

Find Partners

Sometimes, link building occurs in a more intentional way than in the subtler way of adding a signature line to your blog comments. Using Google+ can help you find other businesses that do something similar to what you do, but not the same thing. If you and another business offer complimentary but not identical services, you can link to each other. Finding those businesses by using Google+ is great for your online presence and for your link-building.

Find Affiliates

Affiliate networking is another great way to build links back to your site, and sometimes you can find affiliate marketing opportunities by searching Google+.

Find Social Media Opportunities

Since Google+ is essentially a layer of social media that is transparently rolled out across all your online activities, you can use it for your social media endeavors, which can send links back to your website. For instance, if you’re going to post an update on Google+, you can link to your site. But also, you can use Google+ as a method of updating your other social media sites, as well, like Twitter, Facebook, and even LinkedIn. By adding links back to your site from all your social media updates, you can improve your link building efforts and grow your online presence, and your social media presence, as well.

By using Google+ to find various opportunities to network, market, comment, and engage in social media, you can find many ways to improve your link building, and increase the number of links pointing back to your website across the web. Since Google+ is so efficiently linked to almost everything you do, particularly if the majority of what you do is on Google programs or platforms, you can do this almost effortlessly. In fact, you can even link back to your site on Google Docs if you use them, which can sometimes act as link building, as well.