AuthorRank – The Web Authority

May 15, 2013May 11, 2013

Is AuthorRank or BrandRank Coming for Businesses on Google?

Is AuthorRank or BrandRank coming for businesses on Google? That’s an interesting question and one that I feel Google is leaning toward based on the chatter online, but one I doubt we will see this year. What exactly is BrandRank? First, let’s start with a little bit of detail.

This past year Google really pushed AuthorRank as a way to verify authors and help to build credibility of content. It all starts with a personal Google+ page, a tie-in to your website, and then tagging of your content you may write around the web. When properly done, you will see a face next to an article and SEO juice flows from links to the owner’s website, to the Google+ page, and pushes results higher in personalize and organic placement. It is a real boon for writers such as myself.

Google understood that there are many businesses where this benefit of authority of content would be valuable, especially for big companies/brands. So it quietly rolled out rel=”publisher” in addition to rel=”author”. For brands and companies the ability to tie together a website, blog, Google+ Business page using the publisher tag makes terrific sense.

However, Google has already stated that it won’t be putting a face or brand icon next to any of these results, at least not for right now. With Google really pushing AuthorRank, I would expect them to do the same with BrandRank, but more judiciously and most likely not this year. I just don’t think that they want to dilute what is happening with AuthorRank yet, but I feel that BrandRank will come in the relatively near future.

In the meantime, I would strongly recommend that you position yourself early and start working to develop BrandRank if it is meaningful for your business. Preferentially use AuthorRank if it makes sense to your business or BrandRank if you are a medium to large business.

March 6, 2013March 2, 2013

Using HubSubHubBub to Tag Your Content for Google

Writters Need to Follow These Important Steps to Tag Their Content — Writers Need to Follow These Important Steps to Tag Their Content

On Monday I spoke a little about HubSubHubBub which Google recommends as a way to push out to the Web and tag your unique content to protect your AuthorRank for organic placement. In this post I want to dive a little deeper into this topic to help you understand how using these tools can help you with organic placement.First, I recommend that if you are a blogger that you set up your feed to be delivered by Feedburner which is a Google property. It is easy to set up and account and migrate your blog feed to Feedburner. You’ll end up with a feed that looks like this: http://feeds2.feedburner.com/TheWebAuthority instead of a WordPress generated feed that would look like http://www.mccordweb.com/weblogs/feed.xml. Make sure to select in the publicize tab to connect your feed to PingShot so you are pushing your content out.

Second, use the FD Feedburner Plugin for WordPress to override all settings in your blog platform to point to your new Feedburner RSS feed. It is simple to do once you have your Feedburner account set up.

Third, set up an account at FriendFeed. This is a fairly old application but one that I like and with the ability to push content to it now with Feedburner it operates as a hub for HubSubHubBub which will tag your content. At Feedburner make sure to link not your blog URL, but rather to link your Feedburner feed URL. This action completes the process to tie everything neatly together.

Here’s a great article I found that taught me how to take these steps for my own blog as part of my research for this post. I’d like to thank Jorge Escobar for his excellent article and tips. You can also watch this video about HubSubHubBub to understand why using these protocols are now best practices for any blog and writer.

February 18, 2013February 17, 2013

Getting Google to “Trust” Your Website

Build web authority and trust to place better on Google.com.

Getting placement on Google.com is affected by a number of new factors so getting Google to “trust” your website, when compared to other sites, is extremely important. This “trust” factor is also known as “web authority”. When Google considers your website an authority on a topic, it will place your site higher in the organic search results.

So, how to you get Google to “trust” your website and give it “authority”?

1. Make sure your are transparent about what you sell and your services. Explain what you do and provide informational content about your services or products in a way that does more than just “sell” your own services.

2. Make sure you have a privacy policy that covers tracking, technology, remarketing, what you do with information, and if you lend or sell information to a third part.

3. Get blogging on a regular basis to provide value to readers – not just about your own services, but about your industry, why something is important, current news in your industry, and share your point of view. I like blogging three days a week as it keeps search engines coming back on a regular basis to find new content.

4. Start now building Google AuthorRank either through the rel=author tag or the rel=publisher tag pointing to Google+ properties. By doing this important step you legitimize your online voice tying your website, blog, off site articles all to your Google verified property. This is a very important step to Google’s “trust” factor.

5. Share off domain using social media. I personally like using Twitter, Google+, Google+ Communities, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Make sure the content you create there is share-able and information rich. Don’t use social sites just to parrot back sales and marketing content from your website. Work to engage and add value.

Although our own services aren’t a good match for every business, we may be a good match for your needs. I invite you to check our our services to see if we might be able to help you to start building “trust” with Google now.