If you work in internet marketing, then you realize that there is a face behind every bit of text online. However, your website visitors may not be so quick to realize this. Just try asking any random web users who they think wrote the text for the website they are reading. Chances are the person will say, “I never really thought about it before” How is this going to affect your internet marketing campaign? Without giving your readers a “face” behind the text, it becomes more difficult to connect with them, establish trust, and ultimately convert them.
Google now has found a way to combat the ghost-writing nature of web content with their authorship feature. Internet marketers can use this to system to their advantage. Google’s authorship program was initiated as a way of combating all the search engine optimization tricks that are drowning out high-quality works by expert authors. They devised a system which lets you link your Google+ profile with articles you have authored on the web. Then, your Google profile picture shows up next to your page listing in the search results. You can read how to set up the feature in
Google’s help center for authorship.
The authorship feature is about more than just showing the person behind online articles. Its goal is to help establish authors as experts in certain fields. For example, let’s say that you have a blog about long-distance cycling and you regularly contribute to other cycling blogs as a guest blogger. If you link your blog and all your articles to your Google profile, then Google will be able to identify that you are an expert in cycling. Yes, this is a ranking factor. You will show up higher on the search engines for your expert niche. By contrast, if you have thousands of articles but all on different topics, Google isn’t going to consider you an expert and you won’t get ranked as high just for using the authorship feature.
In theory, you could simply set up a new Google+ profile for each of your niches and then link articles to the appropriate profile. As with any SEO method though, it isn’t ever easy to “trick” Google. You’ve got to have a verified profile if you want the authorship program to really factor into your ranking. Alternatively, you could stop using ghost writers and require all writers to set up Google+ profiles and only link to their fields of expertise. There are still a lot of quirks to work out about using Google authorship to your benefit in larger enterprises but smaller, niche-focused internet marketers shouldn’t hesitate to utilize “rel=me” in their article writing campaigns and blogs.
