There are a lot of Google Plus badges and buttons available from Google, among which the Google +1 button is one of the most useful ones to showcase your participation in this large online community. With the huge development of social media and the tremendous popularity of Google Plus, adding the Google +1 button on your WordPress site is pretty important. In the following, we’d like to tell you why this action is necessary and how to do this.
Why Use It?
In fact, this button can be regarded as a positive signal telling both Google users and spiders that your content is meaningful and worth reading.
For Readers – If your posts are quality, they can showcase their like by clicking the plus one button. As there is a liking count integrated into this button, other people can decide whether to read your content or not simply by estimating your popularity from the statistics.
For Website – To be honest, people are more likely to believe the reviews from common readers or users than from some official information. For instance, a product review from the official site is useful, but the review from your peers or friends can be even better. In this case, the plus one button can be seen as a way of saying “this is very good” or “you can try it with no regret”. Thus, increase your potential readers and traffic significantly.
For Google Search – According to the ranking algorithm of Google, this liking statistics is a useful signal to estimate the relevance between your posts and the user queries. This means the more liking you can get from readers, the higher place you can be ranked by Google in the searching result page.
How to Use It?
Google has launched a special webpage helping people to create a plus one button easily. You can log into this development page and sign in with your Google account. Then, you can see a page as the image presented in the following.
In this webpage, you can decide the button size among small, medium, standard, and tall, choose the annotation between inline and bubble, and determine the width by printing the number. There is a preview section in the right side, with which you can see the final effect and make some adjustments accordingly.
Now, copy the lines of code below the preview section and past them into the right place. The first code can be added at anywhere you want, such as the function.php file of your WordPress theme or your website widget. However, the default code doesn’t include the liking count, so you have to make the configuration with the parameter of count=”true”. Note that the tall size must have a count so there is no need to add it if you choose a tall sized button. See example in the following.
In terms of the second lines of code, you can use it to improve the page loading speed by loading load the JavaScript asynchronously, for the browser can load your page and the JavaScript file in one time. Note that this code needs to be placed before the body tag.
Lastly, you need to find the footer.php file of your theme and include the following line of code before and near the body tag.
Alternative Method
In addition to the above mentioned way, you can also make use of some user-friendly WordPress plugins like Google+ Author Button, Google Plus Share and +1 Button, and Google +1 Button Automator. Simply download and install them from WordPress.org or your WordPress admin panel, then you can add the plus one button easily and effortlessly without the need to coding knowledge.
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