The badge is only available and visible to some developers for now

Nov 10, 2011 14:55 GMT  ·  By

The big news around Google+ this week has been Pages. Google is finally enabling 'non-humans' to create a profile on its social network. As you can imagine, a lot of people (brands, artists, organizations) jumped at the opportunity and set up their own pages.

But with that out of the way, how do you go about advertising your Google+ Page, to enable your customers, readers, fans and so on to know that such a page exists.

The answer is the new Google+ badges, also launched along with pages. The badges can be added to your site enabling visitors to see who your fans are and even add your page to their circles without leaving the site.

"The Google+ badge helps you grow your audience on Google+ and show more recommendations in Google search by letting people add you to their circles and +1 your page, all without leaving your site," Todd Volkert, Technical lead for the Google+ badge, wrote.

If you want your own badge for your site, you'll have to join the Google+ platform preview group. In fact, you won't even see it on other sites if you're not part of that group.

"Today, we officially begin our roll out of that badge by making it available to our Google+ platform preview group," Volkert explained.

"To get the badge, sign up for the group and then visit our configuration tool and choose the badge size that’s best for your site. If you’re in the group, you may also begin to encounter the badge as you browse around the web," he added.

You can visit this page if you want to sign up for the group. Once you've done that you'll be able to generate the code snippet for the Google+ badge for your site.

Be warned though that the feature is not yet available to most users so even if you plant it on your site, only visitors that are part of the preview group will see and no one else, for now.

One great thing about the badge is that it automatically adds your page to Google+ Direct Connect which enables users to search for +yourpagename in Google Search and go directly to your Google+ page. In fact, having the badge is a requirement for Direct Connect.