For a while now, it seems like there is a constant tug of war between the webmasters and Google. While Google is constantly making efforts to refine its search results, and bring in more relevant and authoritative urls on the forefront to queries, the webmasters on the other hand do a daily dissection of what can and should be done to rank their properties, and what completely fires back. In the tryst to get the best foot forward, Google gave birth to what we know as Author Ranks.
What is Author Rank?
When you author a piece of content, it is branded as not just your own content, but it also helps you brand the value of the article. If you’re a great source of information on a specific niche and you participate in Google Authorship, Google is going to rank any of the things written by you higher than others because it trusts your quality. Thus, to build a certain amount of faith in your information, Google lets you build your author value and thus rank according to it.
Explaining the Concept with Greg’s Example
For explaining this, let’s take an imaginary author called Greg Michael who is a national level Chess player and wants to venture into wholesale selling of chess boards as a side business. In this case, Greg is already a known person in the field of chess and must make his followers and the search engines believe that anything coming through him is going to be of much higher value versus what any other person could send out with respect to chess.
For this, Greg creates his Google+ profile and describes his experience with and passion for the game as the description and links his business website to the profile. In addition, he also links his guest posts that he has authored on various other properties on his G+ profile so that Google takes note of all the content that he is pushing on the web. To be able to achieve a sense of authorship in the niche of chess, besides doing all of this, Greg’s prime focus is going to be the quality of content. Since he has done the best he could to exploit the existing brand value of his name in the field of chess, it remains his duty to completely justify that branding with premium content.
Thus, the authorship is going to exploit his knowledge, collate all the properties that he spreads his knowledge on and assimilate all the good words he has received from people everywhere to get the best of his efforts.
Understanding the Basics – How to Go About it
If you own a Google+ account, you must have noticed that it lets you connect your profile to any pieces of content that you may have created on the web. This is where the Google Authorship starts working. When you have connected your best content pieces with your Google+ profile, Google starts ranking you over your competitors if you’re actually producing quality content.
The Trust on a Google Author
When your articles rank on Search Engines, your Google Authorship profile is visible besides the search result. With this is shown a clear picture and your bio that you have stated about yourself. For the user who is searching, he/she gets to see a picture of a real person, there is certain amount of trust that is built in your articles over others since it ensures the user that the source is a real person and not an automated machine trying to fool him with advertising.
Also, this is probably the best way to build a reputation online. You get to maintain a professional profile and have everything linked to it. What better way to consolidate all your information as one package? But with this comes greater responsibility to create quality content.
The Branding as a Package
The concept of Author Ranking is fairly new and only a handful of people have been able to use it in the right way. The point is to understand that everything is about packaging yourself as the most trustworthy source of content in your niche. Whatever tool helps you build this brand is pivotal in your strategy to rank higher. What makes it better than a lot of other ways is that the branding is not of one single url. The brand that is getting an authority is you as the content producer. If the different content peices that you publish are the branches of a tree which will bear the fruits of revenue, then the roots to this tree is the source through which the branches are coming out. It strengthens the roots of your tree and gives it a firm grip on the plant as a whole!