Authorship plays an important role in gaining your audience’s trust. It is one of the strongest trust signals you can add to all your published online content. By claiming ownership of websites and other published online content you’ve created, you can get credit and give your rankings a much-needed boost. This is why it’s important to help your clients claim authorship and build up their author rank. I’ve put together this quick guide to boosting your author rank to help you get started.
Identify Author Rank Indicators
Before you can begin optimizing, you need to identify what indicators affect author rank. You need to start with the most obvious indicator – Google+. Optimize your profile to reflect your brand and provide as much information about the business as possible. Add your blogs and other content you produce in your profile – this is the first step to claiming authorship.
Social sharing signals also show how relevant others find your content, and these contribute to building up your online credibility. The following in particular are believed to help boost your author rank:
- Adding the Google plus-one (G+1) button to your content. Each +1 you gain contributes to your rank indicator.
- Facebook likes and comments
- Tweets, retweets and mentions on Twitter
- Social network shares – both the number of shares you get, and the speed with which readers share your content
Claim Your Authorship
I’ve already mentioned the first part of claiming your authorship on Google. Create a Google+ profile if you don’t have one yet, and optimize it to match your website. Choose a profile photo with a recognizable headshot – this will appear on your search listing once you’ve successfully claimed your authorship. Make sure to add all the content you’ve published online in the “Contributor To” section of your profile, and if you don’t have the +1 button on them yet, add it to your posts. Make sure the profile discovery option in your G+ profile is checked.
The second part of claiming your authorship is to add authorship mark-up to your website, your blog, and your other published online content. All you need to do is to add a link to your Google+ profile in your content using the following HTML code:
<a href=”[PROFILE URL]?rel=author”>Google</a>
Make sure your link contains the ?rel=author parameter – this is what tells crawlers you are the author of the content. Each existing content piece you tag with this mark-up will add credit to your author rank, and each piece of content you add to your “Contributor To” list and tag with the same mark-up will likewise contribute to your ranking. Your listing will look like this once it’s done:
Create and Share Quality Content
At the heart of author rank is credibility, and to build that, you must consistently create and share high quality content relevant to the business you are promoting. You need to show innovation, give a fresh take on elements of your niche that sheds new light to the industry, or simply provide a simpler solution to the problems that your target audience has.
Share your insights through a wide variety of content – blogs, articles, press releases, whitepapers, and lately, even through videos and images – in order to keep your audience engaged. When you create shareable content for your audience, the likes, shares, and comments will naturally follow.
Talk to us today for more tips on boosting your author rank. Your account manager will be very happy to answer your questions and to discuss our solutions to help boost your online credibility and visibility. If you’re not yet our partner, sign up for free today and get started. Keep checking back for more updates!
