If you haven’t heard of Google Plus, Google’s new social network,
then perhaps you’ve been living under a stone for the last year. Whilst
it’s certainly not yet a Facebook or Twitter, Google is doing everything
it can to push and promote it. That’s something that as a blog owner
you should give serious consideration to. Taking on the might of
Facebook is a huge challenge for Google and having learned many lessons
from their previous attempt with social networking called Orkut, this
time they’re out to really push G+.
Of course I can hear you asking why should I care, I already share my
content on Twitter and Facebook which has a far greater reach. The
answer is quite simple. Google is giving out plenty of encouragement for
you to be active with them. As a serious blogger, you should take
advantage of it! So if you’ve gone through your SEO checklist and think you have everything covered, don’t forget to markup your blog with rel=author!
Everyone likes a great picture
The first and most obvious advantage is the ability to have a pretty
picture of yourself in the SERPS (search results). You’ve probably seen
quite a few sites that have this when you search Google. Do you think
you’re more likely to click the result with the picture or the one
without? The web is becoming more social because ultimately people are
social animals. Your picture in the SERPS not only makes you stand out
from your competition, but it can make you appear more trustworthy. As
the vast majority of blogs aren’t yet using Google authorship, then you
really should be! Here’s what it looks like when implemented correctly.
Not only this but click through rates within search results are often
much higher with sites that have authorship enabled. Bottom line, this
means more visitors to your blog. If you even got an easily achieved 10%
increase in your CTR, this means an extra 10% of organic search
visitors to your blog. Obviously that’s clear value to you, no matter if
or how your blog is monetised. A 10% boost in new traffic for 20
minutes of work to set it up is a clear and easy win for you. However,
it gets much better.
The big picture, if you’ll pardon the pun
The big picture goes far beyond the ability to have your picture in
the search results. That’s just a nice little carrot that’s dangled in
front of you. Google wants to stay at the top and to do that they
continually need to find better ways to organise and understand the
plethora of documents on the web. Pagerank and links which are the
fabric of their understanding of the relatedness of the web are buckling
under the pressure. To take things further they need to understand who
is adding the content and how authoritative these people are within the
realm of their topic areas.
Authorship is a great way to do this, and it really is a stroke of
genius. If they can get webmasters like you to link their blogs and
content written around the web to G+, then they can start to understand
more about the context of who is building the great stuff on the web. If
they can understand who the great authors are then they can use that to
rank quality sites much more easily and give their users a much better
experience. If you put out great content, then that means you!
What does this mean for you?
This means that you need to be giving the right signals to Google
that your content is the kind of content that deserves to rank well and
to be receiving the gift of the traffic Gods. Do you already get the
kind of metrics and interactions that Google loves to see on your blog?
Do you get great comments, links, and social shares because of the
quality of your blog? Then you should be telling Google that you are the
author of this great stuff!
Once they know that you are the author you can start to build your ‘author rank’ or agent rank
as their patents describe it. Now I’ll be honest, nobody knows if
Google is currently using this as a signal for ranking. You have to
realise that they’ve put so much effort into it this and it’s likely to
be so potent a ranking signal that it’s obvious that it’s coming soon.
Delivering quality relevant results is at the heart of what Google wants
to do, and you dear reader should see the opportunity to be at the very
heart of it from the beginning. Of course we don’t yet know what the
full effects of this are likely to be, and this post is not the place
for a discussion on correlation versus causation, but hopefully you can see that the potential is huge.
What you need to do set it up
Firstly you need to create a personal profile with Google Plus, fill
out all the information required, and add a picture of yourself. Note,
you need to use an actual real picture of you (a headshot is best).
Company logos are not what was intended here. Then you need to add your
site (or any others that you post on) as a site that you contribute to
in your profile.
Finally you need to add the link to your G+ profile page on your blog
posts and you’re good to go. If you use WordPress as many are, you’re
probably using Yoast’s SEO plugin
(which I highly recommend). Yoast kindly has made it easy for you by
providing fields to do this within the plugin. Alternatively many other
SEO plugins provide this functionality. Once you’ve done this you can
test the results with Google’s Rich Snippets testing tool and if it all works you need to wait a couple of weeks.
The implications of doing this
Google already understands more about your site than you think. It
knows about interactions and social sharing as well as other important
metrics. Make sure that this great stuff is linked to you, the real life
human being. Why? The answer is because as a ‘known author’ you can
take this authority around the web with you. Think of it as a suitcase
full of topic authority. If you contribute to other sites as well as
your own, then your articles there should get a boost based on your
authorship. Also if those other sites do the right things then your
posts should further increase your author rank.
Finally one of the other obvious connotations of this that you don’t
often hear about is the impact of people guest authoring on your site.
It clearly will benefit them but think about how it would impact you to
have the highest quality authors on your site. Once you see that Google
can understand who is authoring all this content you can see that
attracting industry thought leaders and experts to post on your site
(with verified G+ authorship) is going to massively help. Top experts
aren’t going to work with low quality sites, so in effect you can
leverage the authority of others to help your own ranking. You should
positively encourage expert authors on your site! However you need to
make sure that these are quality authors, so your vetting process needs
to be even stricter.
A semi advanced tip
If you’ve already shared content on other people’s sites through the
connections you have then you should contact those site owners. Not only
is it likely to be good to get back in touch anyway, but you can
explain the importance of authorship implementation. If you’ve
contributed to sites all around the web in the past then you may be able
to build up very quickly by implementing this on your past work. A head
start is always a good thing, but just make sure that you only link
quality work back to you.
A final word of caution
I’ll finally say that if you do any kind of black hat SEO promotion,
then you should stay far away from this. Of course most don’t do that
stuff, but I thought I’d mention it. By creating authorship and taking
it around the web with you, you are linking all of your work. You need
to be sure that you’re ‘whiter than white’, otherwise the past might
come back to haunt you.
Why not tell me what you think in the comments. Have you used
rel=author markup and have you noticed a CTR or other improvement on
your blog?
How Authorship can take your blog to the next level in 2013