5 Great Benefits That Authorship Markup Can Give Your SEO Campaign

byDwayneRod

803 followers

9 years ago

Authorship markup is one of the most important branding tools in a site's search engine optimization (SEO) toolbox. Think of a product you purchase consistently that seems to be famous. There's no practical way for most people to determine that it is the best product on the market. The product itself might be average or even bad - but people buy it because of customer loyalty and effective branding.

Authorship markup is how Google knows that you made and published that article or post. It attaches your personal brand to your posts when they come up on the search engine results list. It puts a picture of your face beside your post. It's not only visually pleasing, it also lends the post the credibility of your name. Even if people don't know if you wrote it, the fact that someone owned up to it makes it easier to click.

Benefit 1: More Page Views

Google continues on their quest to become the best search engine available, and with authorship markup, you can benefit from their efforts. Let's say you have a user that found you through Google. They read one of your posts for two minutes, maybe more. They're done reading, so they hit backspace or click the back button. When they return to the results page, they'll find more links under the post they just left, posts that also have your marked as the author.

It doesn't happen for every post - it only happens for posts that a user views for at least two minutes, which isn't a drawback if you've put effort into giving your audience quality content.

Benefit 2: It Improves Your Value as a Writer

Writers are the unsung heroes of search engine optimization. While proper tagging and site construction can help your rankings, it is the writers who are putting their names out there for all to see on content that is as likely to be insulted as it is appreciated.

With authorship markup, that is no longer the case. Writers will get the recognition they deserve. They'll also be held accountable for the quality of their work. Good writers will find their content reaching more people, while bad writers will get less attention.

Benefit 3: It Defeats Plagiarists

Content scraping is one of the most depressing and damaging things that can be done to a site. It is depressing because someone stole your content, and it is damaging because it can affect your rankings. With proper use of authorship markup, your post will jump to the top of the list, as Google will have definitive proof that you wrote and posted the content.

Benefit 4: It Can Help People Trust Your Work

Search engine results pages are inherently impersonal. It is essentially a list of links that came up because a formula decided that they were relevant to your search string. The problem is that more and more people are starting to realize that those results can be manipulated.

Putting a face to the link makes it less impersonal and less likely to be spam or a bad link. It changes you and your post from a faceless and potentially anonymous entity to one that they might think about trusting.

Benefit 5: It Lets You Stand Out From the Crowd

Unless your name is made up of words your parents made up, it is likely that there are people out there who share that name with you. They might even be interested in the same things that you find amazing. They may have also decided to post about those things online. That's all well and good until you realize that it can dilute your authority, especially if they don't have the same skills that you possess.

Authorship markup allows you to become more than a name. It gives you a face, one that people can identify. It lets you avoid any bad publicity that someone with the same name might have accrued.

Authorship markup isn't perfect, but it remains a powerful tool in the right hands. No SEO campaign is complete without it. If you haven't claimed your content yet, now is a good time to do so.