How Authorship can take your blog to the next level in 2013

[yinka]

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!

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.

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 are not 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 have 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 have 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 will 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 would 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.