How Can Installing the Rich Snippet Rel=Author Benefit Your Blog?

It has been close to a year since Google introduced the rel=author markup to the world, have you implemented it yet? For something so simple it sure has the potential to be a game changer for your blogging niche as well as your personal brand building online.

By connecting your Google+ profile with the content you create and publish you are essentially building your authority as a trusted voice. You are also adding credibility to those searching that you are a real person creating the content they crave and consume. While there may be some bloggers and companies that take the time to create sock puppet accounts most will not as it is time consuming and difficult for most to gain much of a return.

Installing the rich snippet Rel=Author can help add to your blog’s credibility and visibility.

This markup language is also beneficial to your reputation management strategy. By connecting the content to your Google+ profile it will identify this information as being authentic and associate it to your name and give you more real estate for searches involving your name.

How to Set Up Rel=Author on Your Blog

To add the Rel=Author markup you will need to link to your Google Profile and your blog.
Let’s look at linking your blog to your Google Profile first. Linking these two allows Google to know that you are an author for this blog. This may be a link from an author page, about page, or it could be a link from your byline.
Your next move is to add a reciprocal link from your profile to the site you are updating. Inside your Google+ profile you will need to click on the about tab and scroll down to “Contribute to” section. You will add a custom link and in some cases it will be the URL of the author or about page rather than root.
Here is how you would do all of this in real life:
So this is how a Google+ profile URL might look like: https://plus.google.com/101570221368373054249/
You would then need to add rel=author to the end of it and have it look something like this: https://plus.google.com/101570221368373054249/?rel=author and link it to your bio or byline.
Then you would go into your Google+ profile and edit the “About” section. Go to “Contributor To” and add the site. If for instance it is a one-off post you would add the direct URL for that post, if it is a site you contribute on, you add a link to your author profile, and if it is a a site like ORM, I added a link to it on the “About Us” page.
For more details, visit Webmaster Tools and learn how to implement it.
You can test all your hard work with Google’s Rich Snippet Testing Tool.

Increase Your Content’s Visibility

There was a time before rel=author that individuals logged in might be able to see something that might have been tweeted or shared by you but only if they were connected with you.
Once you implement the rel=author markup, everyone will see your name and image to left of your own content. This is a huge advantage over the other search results that haven’t quite figured out how to add the rel=author markup.

Higher Click-Through Rates

Since the inception of rel=author, studies have shown that having your image next to the content actually increases the click-through rate of the given search result. Having a photo next to your listing gives the result authenticity and a greater chance that it will be clicked on.

Personal Brand Building

Pick your image wisely as it should be an image associated with your blog. As the visitor clicks on your result and begins to navigate through your content they can associate your face and name to the content.
If you engage in guest blogging, this markup could also increase your brand by connecting all your content to your profile. You can begin to have a singular voice and become more recognizable in your niche.

Future Search Benefits

By creating these power-user accounts it adds value to your blog and becomes a safe signal for Google. The increased belief that Google+ and author authenticity will play a significant role in future organic ranking should move you to make the necessary changes to your blog today.
Photo credits: http://www.virtualsocialmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/Online-Reputation-Management-Services.jpg, http://www.dentalheroes.com/wp-content/uploads//2009/12/online-reputation-management.jpg

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Going Viral: Tips on Generating Infectious Content

Sometime around the other week, I chanced upon this meme in one of the blog communities I frequent:

Then a few days later I found out that the photogenic man had inadvertently grown popular online as – wait for it – Ridiculously Photogenic Guy. Not only did he turn into a blog meme, he even got interviewed on a popular talk show, along with the photographer who snapped his picture, Will King. After that, the video clips of his interview like this one quickly circulated the ‘Net, with almost a million views and still counting.
In a matter of days, Ridiculously Photogenic Guy Zeddie Little went ridiculously viral. And it all started from a photo!

Creating viral content can be highly achievable if you know how to reach your audience in the right way at the right time.

In the social context, going viral is the ability for information to be transferred at a rapid rate through a particular culture. That information then becomes a meme. It’s infectious. And thanks to the Internet and mobile technology, the dissemination of such is incredibly easy and effective.
If you’ve noticed, not all concepts that reach mass popularity are profound. In fact, the simplest of ideas are those that make the greatest impact on the audience because they are generally visceral in nature.

So how can you increase your blog content’s virality?

It’s not enough that you advertise your blog on every social networking platform available. If you can’t offer content – specific, well-timed, and well-thought out content — that can make an impact on your audience, then it will be hard to make a dent.
Understanding what your audience wants is critical, as well as the following considerations:

Inherent value

Your content must be able to provide immediate value to your target audience. Again, it doesn’t have to be profound. But it has to be innovative, easy to remember, and it has to be important to your audience.

Shareability

Providing value to individual audience members is good. But it’s much better if your audience gains extra benefits from sharing your content with others (e.g. funny meme gifs, file and folder sharing).

Embeddability

In the case of images, audio, and video formats, your content has better chances of going viral if it can be easily embedded onto your audience’s respective pages and websites. Your audience can then enjoy a sense of ownership of your content while making it more accessible to others.

Communication transfer

You know the ‘via@website’ tag that appears on shared media? It serves as an advertisement for your blog once your audience shares your content.

Targeted needs

Aside from finding out what your audience wants, it also helps to tap into their needs. The greater the audience’s need, the better the chances of virality. Examples of this would be bored Internet surfers (who need to be constantly entertained), social networking enthusiasts (who often need to find reasons for keeping in touch with friends), and hobbyists (who are compelled to share and gather information about their pursuits).

The ‘cool’ factor

This is extremely tricky. Predicting the next cool thing out there requires keen instincts, sharp observation skills, and more than a bit of luck. The ultimate goal here is not to ride the trending bandwagon, but to create a new trend.

Well-positioned credibility

Producing popular content still calls for an anchor to keep it going around. If your blog offers a venue for your audience to enjoy lively interaction – and it should – make sure that your main material conveys the idea that you mean business. Otherwise, your audience won’t take you seriously in the long run. (Even gag and humor sites are serious about their content, to show that what their visitors want is important to them).

Seeding and sharing

Your content will not share itself, and you’ll never know if it can go viral if you don’t plant it out there first. If you can afford it, you can seed your content, which is paying a social network-savvy group of Internet and mobile users to share your material to targeted communities. Or if you’re on a tight budget, you can simply share your content yourself to an interested audience.

Not all of us will be able to generate viral content, and that’s okay. But it’s certainly worth a shot, because with a basic understanding of what makes people tick coupled with persistence, you just might transform your blog into a blockbuster.

If you’ve already gone viral, how did you do it? Do you have other tips you’d like to share? We would love to hear from you!
Photo credits: http://writelife.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/gossip.jpeg, http://followfanpage.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Fotolia_14998397_Subscription_XXL-200×200.jpg, http://www.webpronews.com/ridiculously-photogenic-guy-is-ridiculously-photogenic-2012-04, http://cdn.ientry.com/sites/webpronews/pictures/photoguy.png (Photo by Will King)

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Proofreading And Editing For More High-Impact Blog Posts

There are few bigger turn-offs for readers than grammar and punctuation flaws in a piece of writing. Such mistakes indicate to the reader that the article has been written in haste, lacks attention to detail and/or has been completed with little effort. As such, it is critically important that you take the time to proofread and edit your blog posts and any other texts you write.

How to proofread your own blog posts

Proofreading and editing your blog posts need not take substantial amounts of time and effort. After all, managing a blog is already a demanding process that requires determination and at times sacrifice, particularly if you are juggling this with work or study.
Here are some simple tips and techniques for proofreading your posts in an efficient and effective manner:
Read your writing as though you did not write it yourself.
This will help you to be objective and critical with your editing. Furthermore, it is very easy to skim your writing and read it as you had intended it to be written and not exactly as it appears. If you do not read it objectively you will miss out on grammar mistakes and punctuation flaws so be careful.
Consider if your writing makes too many presumptions as to the readers understanding of the subject.
Make sure that you consider your audience not only when writing the article but also when you proofread and edit. It can be easy to get absorbed in your writing and make assumptions about the readers’ knowledge of your article’s subject, especially if it is an area in which you have expertise in. The proofreading and editing stage is a good time to fill in any gaps of information that you may have missed for the readers.
Consider the presentation.
As most bloggers know, the presentation of text on a digital device is best optimized for the reading experience differently than that of print media. Shorter paragraphs, bolded text, and bullet points all make writing in a digital context more digestible for readers. This is the stage upon which you should work on the layout and presentation of your text to make it more reader-friendly.
Send the post to a friend or colleague for feedback – if time permits.
If you’re struggling with proofreading and editing, or just plain hate doing it, you can always send it to a friend or colleague for feedback.This method proved extremely fruitful for Jamie, a writer for the annuities infozine iAnnuityRates. “I found it difficult to be objective when reviewing my own writing. By sending it to a friend, also in the writing profession, I gained a lot of useful feedback and insights which ultimately improves the article significantly,” explains Jamie.
It’s really important to remember that the reason you’re writing an article for your blog is to entertain, inform, or persuade the reader – perhaps even a combination of all three. The clearer it is for the reader to absorb, the more high-impact your writing will be. As such, it is very important to spend that extra 10 to 15 minutes to check your writing for grammatical mistakes, punctuation flaws, and any other shortcomings to ensure that you make the most out of your blog posts.

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Bring Your Blogging Muse Back to Life

If you feel that your blogging mojo is flagging, sometimes all it needs is a jolt — or a series of such — to kick it back into gear.

For many of us bloggers, dealing with the minutiae of our non-blogging lives and getting stuck in a routine are our biggest momentum killers. Sometimes it’s also self-doubt, running out of things to say, or other distractions that take the life out of blogging. It can be anything at all.

You’re in the process of brainstorming for new content and someone’s at the door. Or you’re drafting your umpteenth post and the phone rings. Or someone tells you that your blog sucks and you begin to question your worth as a blogger.
And just like that, your muse is dead.
Now getting yourself unstuck takes a lot of work and willpower. There are no shortcuts to getting back on track once you’ve hit a slump, but you can try these tips to help bring back the joy into your blogging, even if you have to do it one day at a time.
1. Post about what you like. It’s a cliche and this may be especially challenging for niche bloggers, but the trick is to figure in your interests in some of your entries — even if it means comparing your assigned subject (eg. trucks) to your favorite cheeseburger.

Making your interests relevant to your blog posts can remind you of what really motivates you in life, and it adds a fun challenge to your writing as well.

2. Practice typing fast. Slow typing can slow down your conceptualization process, because your thoughts have to keep pace with your fingers. Typing fast allows you to quickly see your ideas taking shape in a shorter timespan, so you don’t lose momentum. Take a typing speed test or use a timer.
3.  Switch projects or schedules. If you write about different topics for different blogs at different times, switch them around. Schedule permitting, change the order of topics that you write, or change the time of day that you post. This is the equivalent of brushing your teeth with your non-dominant hand; the point is to refresh your brain by readjusting its routine.
4. Sharpen your writing skills. Whether you’re a novice or a seasoned blogger, you will benefit from engaging in writing exercises from time to time. For novices, this is a great way to polish your grammar and vocabulary, and for experts, this helps refresh your skill set. This also helps boost your confidence about producing quality content.
5. Move! If you have the luxury of changing your writing location, do it. Take your blogging device with you to a coffee shop, a library, outside of your house, or just switch rooms and work there. Again, this is to shift your mind’s focus from the familiar to the new. If you’re short on space, face another wall.

6. Try a different blogging style. If you usually resort to bulleted or itemized blog posts like I do, try two-liner blog entries. Or publish your post in a letter format. Or use pictures instead of words. Or publish a voice recording. This can help you discover other communication methods that might just work for your blog.
7. Remember your reasons for blogging. Sometimes all we need is to take a moment to remember and reevaluate our blogging goals, whether it’s to help support our loved ones, to help us earn enough money for that gadget we want, to become well-known, or even simply because we’re good at it. Recalling the main driving force behind our blogging activity can rekindle love for it, the way remembering a first date or a first kiss can rekindle a tepid romance.

Other tactics you can apply are redesigning your blog site, putting keywords together, doodling your ideas, solving mental puzzles, and reading through your best and favorite blog posts.

The key to reviving your blog is to engage in activities that reenergize your mind while keeping it focused on your blogging tasks. Taking a break from blogging may also be helpful to an extent, but done too long or too often, it runs the risk of detaching you completely from meeting your goals.

My favorites from the list are 1, 3, 4, and 7, plus solving puzzles at random and reading about blogging success stories. These help keep me inspired and grounded during those off-days. And boy, do I have off-days!

Have you tried out these techniques to kick up your blogging activity? If you have other helpful tips to share via the comments section, I’d be glad to try them out!

Image credits: Pinterest.Com, Candaceroserardon.Com, Insurancemarketinghq.Com

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The Latest In SEO: What’s New With Google?

What’s your New Year’s resolution? To lose weight? Make more money? Or finally crack the SEO barrier and get your site to page 1 for that awesome key phrase that gets loads of searches? If you said the latter, this post is for you!

As a result of working as a freelance SEO, I get a pretty close look at what is really going on in the SEO world, and right now I can tell you that it is slowly but steadily changing. Here are some tips on how you should proceed with the SEO on your site in 2012. Enjoy!

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User Behaviour Matters

It has been talked about for a while, and often speculated on, but since Matt Cutts actually acknowledged it we can now be sure: Google is no longer just looking at what’s on your site and who’s linked to it. Any time they send you any traffic they are also going to be watching what that traffic does and how successful your page is at satisfying it.
What That Means For You
If your page appears in a search result and doesn’t get clicked on as often as it should, then your rankings are going to slip. In short, your page title and description matter more than ever, because these are the bits that display in the SERP’s. Get the meta data right by writing titles and descriptions that get users to actually click on your page and not the result above you. Click-through rate is THAT important.

Additionally, what if a user clicks on your result, but then returns to the search engine and clicks on a different result for the same query? To me that screams to Google that your site didn’t solve the user’s problem, so they tried again. Action plan? Check your bounce rates and navigation paths — there is no good or bad, it all depends on your niche, but one thing is for sure: actively trying to improve usability and bounce rates will help your site and your SEO.

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Google Bot Chrome

This has been speculated upon but not proven, though the evidence is compelling (Google it). You know those previews that appear at the side of search results when you hover over them? They show you what a website looks like, and they even show you where the ‘fold’ is on the page.

The scary but amazing conclusion from this and some other evidence and anecdotal study is that Googlebot can actually render a page and ‘appreciate’ how a page actually looks, where content is and which bits have most precedence on the page.

What That Means For You
If your site looks spammy or just poor it might actually hurt you in SEO terms. So if the first thing in your content is a big ad, then Google ‘knows’ that you are prioritizing monetization over user satisfaction. Also, if your navigation looks messy or if your code has errors that make your images overlap your text Google will probably figure that out.

Remember that Google is constantly monitoring user behavior and finding patterns that might indicate good sites or bad sites. So if your site happens to have similar indicators as those found in ‘bad’ sites, you might get pegged as a baddy yourself. Maybe it’s time to review template through fresh eyes and make the necessary improvements.

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Anchor Text Engineering Is A Risky Game

More and more Google is cracking down on link building that games the system. Think about it: if 100 sites linked to yours out of the goodness of their own hearts, without you asking them to, what are the chances of having more than a handful of them using exactly the right anchor text?

It’s likely that you might get 10 or 20 links using close keywords, maybe another 20 using vaguely related terms, and the other 60-70 might use ‘click here’, ‘more info’ or just your URL.

What That Means For You
So in reality those numbers will vary wildly depending on the context and maybe for certain pages your hit rate of anchor texts would be much better, but the point is, you are never going to naturally get a ‘perfect’ link profile. So when you try to build a perfect link profile you actually might be hurting yourself more.

The key takeaway here is that you need to vary it naturally, and sometimes that might even mean the occasional non-SEO’d link. There are of course many more intricacies to this which vary from niche to niche, but the focus is on making it natural and ethical; don’t try to game the system because you will lose.

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In Summary

What I have discussed here is based on research, logic, SEO biz scuttlebutt, and mostly personal experience. That said, these ideas make sense to me. We can all see the direction Google is heading in, and it is clear that they have the technology available to work this way.

I hope that the ideas above will help you start thinking in a different way about how your site looks, reads, works, etc. Improving your site has always been a good goal to have, but now you have an extra incentive to do so.

And finally, link building is certainly not going anywhere. Quality link building is just as important as ever, it’s just that there are now a few newer and more important concerns to deal with as well.

Thanks for reading! Please use the comments box below to thank me for imparting my wisdom or to hurl abuse at me.

Photo credits: www.dreamtemplate.com, www.techankit.com

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