It’s been clear from the beginning that Google+ would play a major role in search, and as time has gone on, we’ve seen various glimpses of this, whether it be the +1 buttons, Google connecting authors to their Google Profiles, or adding Circle counts and Google+ comments to search results.

Today, Google announced the launch of Pages for businesses, brands and products. More on this here.

Along with these pages comes the ability for people to add your page to their Circles from search results. They can do this one of two ways: adding from the search result, or by using Google+ Direct Connect, which lets you enter a “+” with the Page you’re looking for as the query:

Along with Pages, Google is also launching badges and icons that sites can add, to connect their site to their Page. These will be available in the coming days. People can add your page to their Circles right from your site.

This is all bound to be very helpful for brands, and we all know that social signals are a considerable part of what Google is looking at these days.

But perhaps even more significant yet, is this next part. Google+ Pages Product Management Director Dennis Troper writes on the Inside AdSense blog:

You can also link your site to your Google+ page so that all your +1s — from your Page, your website, and search results — will get tallied together and appear as a single total. Potential visitors will be more likely to see the recommendations your site has received, whether they’re looking at a search result, your website, or your Page, meaning your +1’s will reach not only the 40 million users of Google+, but all the people who come to Google every day. You can link your site to your Page either using the Google+ badge or with a piece of code. To set this up, visit our Google+ badge configuration tool.

So, this should help your site get associated with more +1’s altogether, and Google has been very clear about this being used as a ranking factor from day one.