From Authorship to AuthorityWhy Claiming Your Identity Matters

By Chuck Price, Measurable SEO

Google+ is ...

More importantly, Google+ is ...

A way to link content published to a Google+ profile. Search results include a head shot of the author, a link to his/her Google+ profile, the number of Google+ circles the author is in and a link to more search results for the author.

Why does it Matter

"Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification, which will result in most users naturally clicking on the top (verified) results. The true cost of remaining anonymous, then, might be irrelevance." – Eric Schmidt

‘Twitter Can No More Produce Analysis Than A Monkey Can Type Out A Work of Shakespeare’ c Schmidt

How long do I have to prepare?

When can we expect to see this Impacting the SERPs?

Google is piloting the display of author information in search results to help users discover great content

It’s happening now

Google is piloting the display of author information in search results now to help users discover great content

Anyone Can be an Author

Who can become an Author?

Step 1: Setup a Google+ Profile

https://plus.google.com/

Your Profile Picture is Your Brand - Choose it wisely

A Profile Tip

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-author-photos

Cyrus Shepherd did some fascinating research on the effects of profile pictures on click through rates. In the end, he determined there was no magic formula for the perfect picture, but after testing a series of images, he was able to improve CTR by 35%. That is impressive

It pays to test

You Look Where They Look

Ann Smarty used heat map testing in her quest for the perfect profile picture. One surprising observation: “you look where they look”.

http://bit.ly/WdGhM3

Rich Brooks’ profile picture is a great exampleOf the Heat map Research could be deployed

What are you looking at?

Step 2: Link to your content

http://bit.ly/RZ7hbT

Step 3: Link your content to Google

You Have 3 Different Options Available

Option 1

http://bit.ly/vGZRbu

Option 2

http://bit.ly/vGZRbu

Option 3

If your CMS allows, Use a Plugin

3 easy steps: 1. Plugin Installation 2. Enter Google Profile URL 3. Post a link from your Google + Profile to Your Website

http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/

Use the Structured Data Testing Tool to verify that it's working

http://bit.ly/Pea703

Guest Blog Tip

When you guest blog, make sure that you give the host blog the proper HTML with a link to your Google+ profile and rel=author in the link. If they don’t add the markup, you don’t get the rich snippet.

Next, add a link to the guest blog post itself in your “Contributor to” links.

Pro Tip

Pro Tip

Claim Authorship for All of your content on the Web - not just the newly produced

Tip 1 for becoming Irrelevant

If you don't want your authorship information to appear in search results, edit your profile. Uncheck Profile discovery option “Help others discover my profile in search results”

http://plus.google.com/me/about/edit

What about Persona’s & Ghost Writers?

This is a “Gray” Area

Pro: You maintain Full Ownership of written content – no worries about an author embarrassing your brand at some point

Con: This breaks with the intent of Authorship and Author rank. Google's Matt Cutts has pointed to FTC legislation against “sock puppet” accounts

Benefits of Authorship

Build your personal brand!

Increased CTR on search results

Ranking #1 isn’t enough - images are now influencing CTR

Which result stands out? ---->

Authorship Benefits & Takeaways

The key benefit for an author is visibility within the SERPs, which helps with branding.

For webmasters, higher CTR and increased traffic are the most important benefit.

Higher CTRs will become a fleeting benefit. The more sites and authors that implement authorship markup, the less distinguishing the authorship markup will become.

Searchmetrics reported that search results with authorship already exceeds > 17%. As soon as authorship markup is a common practice the impact on CTR will flatten

Can my company get authorship?

REL=”PUBLISHER” is for businesses

Link Your Google+ Page to Your Website

http://bit.ly/z6tMHO

http://bit.ly/z6tMHO

There are plug-ins to simplify the process. The latest version of the Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin has a section to add the URL of your G+ business page

http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/

Benefits of using rel=”publisher”

Your Google+ page will be recognized as the "official" page for your brand, and give it search preference over impostor pages.

Provides eligibility for Google Direct Connect, which takes searchers directly to a brand's Google+ page when they search for the brand name with a "+" in front of it.

Provides increased +1s: all +1s done on the site, on the G+ page, in search results, and on AdWords ads will be aggregated.

Begins to build a topical relevance and trust profile on that brand, it's web content, it's Google+ activities, and other social media activity linked from its profile, that may influence search results

Authorship is not the same as Author Rank

In 2005 Google first came out with an idea of tying a ‘rank’ to the authors of articles on the internet, this idea was called ‘agent rank’. The problem Google had was that they did not have enough data about social interactions to justify using it to rank authors. That changed when Google created their own social network called Google +. Now they can use the data from Google + to add a human element to their rankings

Google is counting on AuthorRank to provide a reliable signal for predicting the quality of new content. After all, past performance is the best predictor of future performance. The ultimate goal is to have content written by authoritative authors’ rank better than content that is written by less authoritative authors.

“We know that great content comes from great authors, and we’re looking closely at ways this markup could help us highlight authors and rank search results.” - Google Webmaster Central Blog

Author Rank as a Quality Signal

http://bit.ly/l8k7eY

Google+ Participation – Level and type of activity could impact Author Rank. Post original work – not just re-shares. Like, comment & reply to comments. Do hangouts, Join communities, create and populate circles

Influence — What’s the quality of your circles? Are you getting +1's, Likes and tweets?

Average PageRank of your published content

Citations: Mentions on authoritative websites could send a quality signal to Google

Links: Lots of links to your content from unique domains could be used to gauge quality

Possible Author Rank Metrics

Benefits of Author Rank

Authors now get recognition & credit for being an authority in their field. Whether you are a mechanic, doctor, lawyer, dentist or architect, you want to be known as THE expert in your field. Author Rank builds this authority with every great piece of content you create.

In the past, creating great content was a benefit for the website or blog that it was published on – that's where it ended. With authorship, not only will that website benefit, but you as an individual author will also benefit.

Authorship provides portability of your expertise. If you leave an employer, you can take it with you!

Moving from authorship to authority

It's a gradual, organic process

There are NO shortcuts

Write Useful Content

Content that people ”need” to read and share.

Monitor your content’s performance

When you login to Google webmaster tools with the account associated with your Google+ profile, you will find search stats for all of the pages for which you are the verified author.

It’ll show you which pages are shown in the search results, how many times, how many clicks they received, which CTR the result has and the average position.

Identify Authors with Authority - Interact with opinion leaders

Give them a reason to follow you – Boost your own Authority

Trace your posts with Ripples - See who’s sharing

Try out Ripples: bit.ly/ZsqzKF

Why use Google+ Ripples?

Ripples visualizes sharing interaction data for your posts over time. This makes it easy to follow key influencers and learn what content is most compelling to your audience.

How to use Google+ Ripples

Ripples provides a visual guide to who has publicly shared a post or URL and the comments they’ve made. Use it to spot trends and track the spread of posts over time, or see how a post was shared and in which languages

Author Rank Takeaway

Once you’ve established authorship, you need to start working on your authority. That starts with publishing high quality, sharable content.

Other ways to increase authority include:

Getting published on authoritative websitesStimulating conversation about your posts on Google+Bringing your posts to the attention of other authoritative authorsInviting authoritative authors to publish on your siteIncreasing activity and connecting to authors on Google+

The key to building Author rank lies in usage of Google+ and interacting with other sites and authors.

http://www.measurableseo.com/smx-toronto-2013

Chuck PriceMeasurable SEO

Chuck@MeasurableSEO.com