Marisa Brasile
By: Marisa Brasile – Bayshore Solutions Marketing Coordinator
With Google continuing to encourage us to produce high-quality content, authorship and publisher tags are key to ongoing SEO strategies. Google’s Executive Chairman, Eric Schmidt, states that websites who use verified authorship rank higher in search engine results pages:
“Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification, which will result in most users naturally clicking on the top (verified) results. The true cost of remaining anonymous, then, might be irrelevance.”
Bottom-line: if you want your content to rank, build your author authority now. By being recognized as authority on the web, you may gain a boost in search results for content/topics you wrote. This is important because it will improve your click through rate which means more visitors to your website. Google considers verified authorship to be the original source and may lower the rank of other identical content on the web.
So how do you secure verified authorship? With the correct use of author and publisher tags. Authorship and publisher tags will ultimately be crucial to securing and protecting original content.
Rel=Author
Google’s Authorship Program allows authors (and those who produce content) to establish a connection between their Google+ profiles and their content on the web. This helps Google understand the contents of your website and articles. Some points to keep in mind:
- Must have a personal Google+ account
- Claims articles
- Verifies original content by real people
- Google+ profile picture appears in search results next to your content
Rel=Publisher
Google’s Publisher Program creates a connection between a business’ Google+ page and its official website. Google will use information on this business page to enrich search results for that publisher. It lets users know that this is the official, verified page of the business. Points to consider for rel=publisher include:
- Must have a Google+ business page
- Claims websites
- Verifies brand page and website as a whole
- Google+ summary page appears in search results – great SERP presence and branding move!
Google offers several methods to verifying authorship and publisher tags. When in doubt on which tag to use for what, just remember, the rel=author markup is for content pages only and the rel=publisher tag is verification for your whole website. The digital marketing team at Bayshore Solutions can implement these tags for you and help you get the recognition you deserve on the web. Contact us to get started!
Marisa Brasile is a Marketing Coordinator at Bayshore Solutions—a Web Design, Web Development, and Digital Marketing Company.