How To Add a Google +1 Button To Your Website

Posted by Matt Stefanik on Jun 17, 2011 8:32 am

The Google +1 button is Google’s version of the Facebook “Like” button or even Twitter’s “Tweet,” “Retweet” or “Follow” buttons. The idea of the Google +1 button is to allow individuals searching for something to find relevant content as determined by their friends or people whom they may already know.

So, basically if you are searching for a new gizmo and you see in your search results that someone you already know has given a particular gizmo a Google +1, you may find that information useful and it could also help in your decision making.

Adding the Google +1 button to your website gives your users the opportunity to recommend your content to their friends and family or perhaps just future visitors. This is obviously a good thing for you and your website’s traffic, though not having many Google +1’s is not necessarily going to hurt you.

Who exactly are “people you know” according to Google? First of all, you must be signed in to Google in order for Google to recognize you. While signed in, Google uses people in your gmail contact list, Google Talk chat list, contacts in your “My Contacts” group in your Google profile if you’ve added them, people you may be following in Google Reader and finally connections you may have in Google Buzz.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Google had other secret agent type ways of knowing who you know that they could add to your Google +1 recommendations. Hey, why is there a red dot on my chest? Just playing, Google.

In today’s video, I’m going to show you how to easily add the Google +1 button to your website and also how to create an event in Google Analytics for each time someone gives your site a Google +1.

Below is the amended script so you can copy and paste into your files. If you don’t care about creating an event in Google Analytics for each time someone pushes your Google +1 button, don’t even worry about this code. Grab your code from the site where you created your Google +1 button.

Original script to be added between <body> tags: <script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js”></script>

New script with callback functionality added: <script type=”text/javascript”
function plusone_vote( obj ) { _gaq.push(['_trackEvent','plusone',obj.state]); }
src=”http://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js”></script>

This code is courtesy of Yoast.
(If this structure is incorrect, someone with more coding knowledge please correct me. Thanks!)

If you’d prefer not to mess around with code and would rather add it to a Wibiya bar, you can go to Wibiya to get your free bar. Also, I’m sure there will be serveral plugins for WordPress coming out which will make implementing the Google +1 button much easier. I’ll update this post when I find a good one.

To Your Success,