3 Tips for Maximising the Benefits of Google Authorship
Having emphasised the importance of Google Authorship for PR professionals, content marketers and SEO specialists in our post ‘Google Authorship and PR Professionals’ (Here), we thought it only fair to provide you with a few helpful tips on making the most out of what authorship has to offer.
Targeting Voices of Authority
When reaching out to/ developing relationships with bloggers, journalists and other writers, qualifying and targeting those individuals with the highest possible levels of authority is of utmost importance. ClearVoice, a free tool examining Web content producers’ authority, is the first tool to categorise and measure creators of online content based on levels of author authority.
To do this, the ClearVoice content platform takes Websites’ reach/ value and the frequency at which content is posted, as well as amount of online content and the overall number of publications into account. Social amplification of content/ posts containing properly attributed Twitter and Google+ tags is also taken into consideration in this process.
Content Tagging
Whether drafting press releases or creating guest posts, tagging content and including meta-data (the information seen by Google/ other search engine’s bots) within posts is essential. This includes clearly marking content up with relevant Twitter/ Google+ meta tags, which can be implemented by working through the CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) where “rel=author” attributes are included and the author’s name links to his/ her page.
WordPress and similar content management systems make adding this code easier by providing HTML views. Those with little or no experience in coding may enlist the help of in-house or outsourced Web development experts.
Targeting high Search Authority Publications
According to a study conducted by ClearVoice, 34.4{1884f1fad642c0a335e320fbf36199da8501940de449f82beb0b1edf5c3b25f3} of the 500 top publishers use proper Google+ authorship, while 40.8{1884f1fad642c0a335e320fbf36199da8501940de449f82beb0b1edf5c3b25f3} use Twitter mark-up. Having made major efforts towards marking content up with rel=author and rel=pub, publishers may still have a long way to go, but those targeting publications with mark-up implementation will find that they have a much better chance of their content being ranked higher than any non-contributed content.
Ultimately, all of this ties back to the ‘who’ behind Web content being rewarded by Google, so implementing these tips is definitely well worth the effort.
