Professional bloggers and content providers put a lot of effort into ensuring that their blog performs from an SEO perspective. In order to take advantage of business opportunities through your blog (such as PPC advertising and Brand Ambassadorship) you need to demonstrate that you have built an engaged audience around your niche topic. One of the ways that Brands and Advertisers measure that engagement is by reviewing your Global Page Rank in Alexa.
For new bloggers, visit Alexa.com to download the tool bar that will enable you to see a variety of statistics on any website (including your own domain).
Whether you write a single blog or for multiple domains your blog becomes a portfolio piece that demonstrates your ability as a writer to provide engaging content that readers enjoy. It is your ability to draw a positive regionally significant audience that Brands and Advertisers are interested in. It can take years to develop a high ranking in search engine results by honest measures, but Google is about to change that by implementing Google Author Rank. It is in fact good news for professional writers and bloggers and will provide some legitimacy and official credentials to regular contributors and serious writers.
What’s the catch? You are going to need to set up a Google+ account (if you don’t have one already) and start sharing content and building your network there. Your Author Rank will be directly attributed to your audience on Google+, YouTube (owned by Google) and other criteria.
How Google Author Rank Is Calculated
- The number of audience that a Google+ member has in their circles
- The average number of +1 and number of reshares of their content in Google+
- The number of circles the author participates in
- The online influence of members of your audience (with high Author Rank)
- Number of comments received on your domain (and author’s response to comments)
- The number of natural “native” posts on Google+ of content made by the author
- External authority indicators (presence on digital directories, Wikipedia page)
- YouTube subscribers and engagement on YouTube channel
- Number of followers on authority social networks (Twitter, Linkedin, SlideShare)
- Publishing authority (real world published works) i.e., Google Books
The good news is that the majority of professional bloggers will already have many of these requirements in place. If you don’t however, simply pay more attention to the Author Rank criteria and focus your efforts on social media networks that support your content and re-shares. Engage with your audience frequently and create more interaction with your readers. The intent for Google is not to penalize talented writers who are already contributing meaningful content to the web but to eliminate people who are using “black-hat” SEO or gaming search methods to rank their websites higher, without investing in quality writing.
Start by visiting the official Google Authorship page to link your Google+ account to the content that you write online. The process is fast and easy if you use an email with your domain i.e., Janeblogger@janesblog.com. If you do not use a domain specific email, visit this link to embed a code onto your website to allow Google to verify your Authorship.
If all goes according to plan Google will be advancing the value, reputation and opportunities for quality bloggers and content writers which is great news for all of us!
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