Steps That Will Give Your WordPress Blog an Efficiency revolution For 2014

 If you’ve been thinking about updating your blog for the New Year, but are anxious that it might be overwhelming,

There are eight easy things you can do to update your blog to help you work more efficiently and make your blog more competent at bringing in leads and hopeful sharing. 

And the best part: You don’t need to use a dime to implement any of the tips. If you have a crucial understanding of how to use WordPress and minimal design skills, you are all set.

Are you ready to see a boost in your blog’s metrics for 2014?  Here’s what you need to do:       

1. Create CTA Footer Images

A call-to-action (CTA) footer image is a clickable image that you insert at the bottom of each blog post. These images are an professional way for business bloggers to promote resources, products or a specific message to their readers. On most really popular blogs, like Hubspot’s, you will watch they always use CTA footer images.

My company blog, Socially Stacked, uses a CTA footer image at the bottom of every blog post to feature one of our newest eBooks or PDF downloads. When readers click the image, the free resource instantly gets downloaded onto their desktop. Here’s an example of the CTA footer image created for a recent eBook.

HubSpot uses CTA’s to cheer readers to download their resources and promise to their blog.  It’s best to create multiple CTA’s for the bottom of your posts and rotate them.
To generate these CTA footer images, we use Photoshop to design bar images that are the width of our blog post column. Once we’ve shaped them, we upload them into the WordPress Media Library and type “CTA” in the account box of the image.

 This way, after we write a blog post, we can easily search “CTA” in the Media Library and all our CTA footer images will appear, making it easy for us to exchange them. The next only some steps are as follows:

1.    one time your CTA footer image is inserted into your blog post, click the landscape icon to edit it.

2.    In the “Edit Image” tab, insert a link in the “Link URL” section that is appropriate to your CTA footer image. For instance, if the CTA footer image we feature is about our newest holiday eBook, in the “Link URL” section we insert the direct download link for the holiday eBook.

3.    Click “Update” and you’re done!

2. Set up Tracking Links

For 2014, commit to using tracking links on your blog. Tracking links will help you befall a whole lot more efficient at tracking the return on your blog’s content. The link-tracking software that I use for ShortStack is Improvely — the least-expensive plan is $29 a month and well worth the investment.

Improvely links are awesome because you can use them anywhere: an ad, highlighted text, a newsletter sign-up button, etc. When a reader clicks on the benefit that has an Improvely link in it, you are then able to see in Improvely’s dashboard whether any of those properties produced any conversions.

All of our blog’s CTA footer images have Improvely links in them. To do this, after you’ve uploaded your CTA footer image into a blog post, edit the image’s Link URL to be an Improvely link — it’s that simple!

Using Improvely links in the CTA footer images allows you to easily analyze which of your CTA footer images are clicked most and which are converting the most blog readers into blog subscribers or check users.

3. Permit For Pin-Ready Blog Post Images

Pinterest has become one of the web’s top social platforms and is a huge source of traffic for a lot of blogs. To make your blog content more Pinterest friendly, keep this one little trick in mind: After you’ve updated your blog post images, edit your image’s “Title” and “Alternative Text” sections to have the same title as your blog post.

Doing this helps with your blog’s SEO and it makes it so that when a reader clicks on either your blog’s Pinterest plugin or share button, your blog post image is ready to be pinned right away. anything copy you put in the “Title” option of your image will appear as the pin’s description copy.

4. Download Tweetable Code (the way The New York Times does)

In August of 2013, the New York Times tested a new characteristic in one of their online articles that allowed readers to tweet highlighted quotes from the story. According to Mashable, the publisher reported that the story they tested the new characteristic with first was shared approximately 11 times more than their most accepted Times stories in the past month. Even if you get a much smaller bump, it’s a very simple way to highlight chunks of tweetable text.

You can download Tweet to Code and learn how to use the characteristic on your WordPress blog. Also, if you’re thinking you’d rather not have to download something to your WordPress blog, but you love the feature, there are other options. Consider using a simple and free online tool like Click to Tweet to create highlighted, tweetable text pieces within your posts.

5. Install Twitter Cards

Installing a WordPress plugin that enables Twitter Cards makes your blog’s content pop in the Twitter feed. When one of your readers uses your blog’s Twitter button(s) to share a link to one of your Twitter-card enabled post, their tweet will feature intro text and an image from your blog articles in the tweet . The more noticeable and attractive your blog’s content is in the Twitter feed, the better, and the more likely it is to be shared.

Installing Twitter Cards to your WordPress blog is a little tricky and can take some developer skills. If you’re serious about using Twitter Cards, I recommend you do a little research on them share with your business’s on-staff developer. Websites like GitHub.com offer great resources for those involved in learning more.

6. Launch Google Authorship

Google authorship is more influential than it looks. When you set up Google authorship on your WordPress blog, it connects blog post authors’ Google+ accounts to WordPress. The instant change after you do this is that your Google+ profile image and byline is featured in search results pages.

The deeper advantage of Google authorship is that it makes your blog’s content stand out in search results. According to heatmap eye-tracking studies, discussed in a great blog post on Buffer’s blog, rich snippets  are more eye-catching and get more clicks — the research proves it.

If your blog’s writers previously have Google+ accounts, establishing Google authorship is a breeze. After you “link your Google+ profile to the content you create” there are just a little more simple steps. 

7. Add Twitter Buttons

If you want to use your WordPress blog to boost your brand’s number of Twitter followers, use Twitter buttons in your posts. They’re incredibly easy to use and customize.
To add Twitter buttons you can start by heading to Twitter’s resource page. There, choose the Twitter button you want to use in your blog post, then copy and paste the code Twitter gives you into WordPress’s “Text” tab of  the post you’re working on. And boom, you’re done! If you covet, check out the new feature in preview mode before you publish your article.

8. Join Blog to An RSS Publisher

It can be time-consuming to log in to each of your brand’s social platforms to post about your newest blog article. To save time, use the free tool IFTTT — it stands for “If This Then That” and it allows you to make time-saving social media “recipes.” What does that mean, exactly? You can easily connect your blog’s RSS feed to your different social platforms.

For instance, you could use the “RSS to Twitter” recipe so that whenever a new article is published on your blog, a link to it is tweeted out on your brand’s Twitter profile. basically, recipes make sharing your blog’s content automatic. And automatic content sharing allows your WordPress blog to be super efficient.

January is the perfect  time to reflect on how you can improve your business’s blog. Whether you’re one of the 37 percent of marketers who say “Blogs are the most precious type of content marketing.” or a small business owner who wants to make your blogging efforts more capable, these eight tips can help your blog perform better in 2014 than it did in 2013.

you might also like: Social Media to Increase Blog Traffic

Matt Cutts about SEO and Future of Google Search

Matt Cutts kicked off day two at Pubcon with another of his signature keynotes, dispelling myths, talk about spammers and about Jason Calcanis’ keynote from day one, at the influence of the audience.

First, Cutts spoke about Google’s “Moonshot changes,” which he bust down into these areas:

•    Knowledge graph

•    Voice search

•    Conversational search

•    Google now

•    Deep Learning

He exposed that Deep Learning is the ability to make relationships between words and apply it to more words, and how it can help improve search and the nuances of search queries.

Deep Learning in Regular and Voice Search

He explained that voice search is varying the types of search queries people use, but also that it can be refined without repeating earlier parts of the user’s search queries. It does this when it knows the user is still penetrating the same topic, but drilling down to more details.

Hummingbird, Panda & Authorship

Next up, Cutts spoke about Hummingbird and he feels that a lot of the blog posts about how to rank with Hummingbird are not that applicable. The fact is, Hummingbird was out for a month and no one noticed. Hummingbird is above all a core quality change. It doesn’t impact SEO that much, he said, despite the many blog posts claiming otherwise.

Of most interest to some SEOs is that Google is looking at softening Panda. Those sites caught in grey areas of Panda--if they are quality sites--could see their sites start ranking once more.

Google is also looking at boosting authority throughout authorship. We have seen authorship becoming more and more significant when it comes for search results and visibility in those results; Cutts confirmed this is the direction in which Google will continue to move.

Google on Mobile Search Results

Next, he discussed the role of smartphones and their shock on search results. This is completely an area SEOs need to continue to focus on, as it is clear that sites that are not mobile-friendly will see a negative impact on their rankings in the mobile search results.

Smartphone ranking will take numerous things into account, he explained:

•    If your phone doesn’t display Flash, Google will not illustrate flash sites in your results.

•    If your website is Flash heavy, you need to consider its use, or ensure the mobile version of your site does not use it.

•    If your website routes all mobile traffic to the homepage rather than the internal page the user was attempting to visit, it will be ranked lower.

•    If your site is slow on mobile phones, Google is less likely to rank it.

Cutts was attractive clear that with the significant increase in mobile traffic, not having a mobile-friendly site will seriously impact the amount of mobile traffic Google will send you. Webmasters should begin prioritizing their mobile strategy immediately.

Penguin, Google’s Spam Strategy & Native Advertising

Matt next talked about their spam strategy. When they initially launched Penguin and the blackhat webmaster forums had spammers bragging how they weren’t touched by Penguin, the webspam team’s answer was, “Ok, well we can turn that dial higher.” They upped the impact it had on search results. Cutts said that when spammers are posting about wanting to do him physically harm, he knows his spam team is doing their job well.

He did say they are continuing their work on some specific keywords that tend to be very spammy, including “payday loans,” “car insurance,” “mesothelioma,” and some porn keywords. Because they are highly profitable keywords, they attract the spammers, so they are working on

Spam networks are still on Google’s radar and they are still bringing them down and taking action against them.

Bad News for PageRank Fans

For PageRank devotees, there is some bad news. PageRank is updated internally inside Google on a daily basis and every three months or so, they would push out that information to the Google toolbar so it would be visible to webmasters. sadly, the pipeline they used to push the data to the toolbar broke and Google does not have anyone working on fixing it. As a result, Cutts said we shouldn’t wait for to see any PageRank updates anytime soon--not anytime this year. He doesn’t know if they will fix it, but they are going to judge the impact of not updating it. The speculation that PageRank could be retired is not that far off from the truth, as it currently stands.

Communication with Webmasters, Rich Snippets, Java & Negative SEO

Google continues to boost their communication with webmasters. They made new videos covering malware and hacking, as Google is seeing these problems more and more, yet not all webmasters are understandable about what it is and how to fix it. They are working on with more concrete examples in their guidelines, to make it easier for people to determine the types of things that are causing ranking issues and point webmasters in the right direction to fix it.

Cutts worried that he is not the only face for Google search. They have 100 speaking events per year and do Hangouts on Air to educate webmasters. They hold Webmaster Office Hours, to boost communication and give users the chance to engage and ask questions of the search team.

Google is becoming smarter at being able to read JavaScript, as it has absolutely been used for evil by spammers. However, Cutts cautions that even though they are doing a better job at reading it, don’t use that as an excuse to create an entire site in JS.

Matt also says negative SEO isn’t as common as people consider and is often self-inflicted. One person approached Matt to say a competitor was ruining them by pointing paid links to their site. Yet when he looked into it, he exposed paid links from 2010 pointing to their site, and said there was no way competitors would have bought paid links back in 2010 to point to their site, since. the algorithm punishing paid links wasn’t until a couple years after those paid links went live.

The Future of Google Search: Mobile, Authorship & Quality Search Results

On the future of search, he again stressed the importance of mobile site usability. YouTube traffic on mobile has skyrocketed from 6 percent two years ago, to 25 percent last year, to 40 percent of all YouTube this year. Some countries have more mobile traffic than they do desktop traffic. Cutts reiterated, “If your website looks bad in mobile, now is the time to fix that.”

Google is also working on machine learning and training their systems to be able to understand and read at an elementary school level, in order to improve search results.

Authorship is another area where Google wants to develop, because tying an identity to an authorship profile can help keep spam out of Google. They plan to squeeze up authorship to combat spam and they found if they removed about 15 percent of the lesser quality authors, it dramatically increased the presence of the better quality authors.

Matt Cutts Q&A

During Q&A, Cutts discussed links from press release sites. He said Google recognized the sites that were press release syndication sites and simply discounted them. He does stress that press release links weren’t penalized, because press release sites do have value for press and marketing reasons, but those links won’t pass PageRank.

In closing, Cutts said they are keeping a close eye on the mix of organic search results with non-organic search results

5 Ways to essentially create Leads from Your Blog

Every time Google mentions SEO recently they talk about content. They continue to repeat that the best way to increase rankings is to produce quality content. The content will generate shares, +1s, and visitors. It will generate backlinks and engagement.

The reaction in the last 12 months or so has been excited. Marketers are practically jumping up and down on their keyboards in an attempt to impress the omnipotent Google with their content genius.

But, amidst all this content formation haste, there is another thing marketers often overlook: in fact generating leads from the blog posts they write. Considering that a marketer’s main job is to generate leads, this is a rather unfortunate. This article will discuss a foolproof plan to make leads with your blog.

1) Write helpful Content

Most marketing content isn’t all that helpful. Most of it, in fact, is pretty self-serving and common.
But, here’s the big question: what constitutes helpful content?

 Content needs to authorize the reader. It needs to teach them how to do something. It wants to solve a problem for the reader, allay a fear, or improve their position in some way. 

2) Write A Lot of helpful Content

 
Writing 1 blog post a week won’t cut it. And surely writing a blog post a month won’t cut it either.
If you want to move the SEO spine—that is, get people to your blog purely—and then generate leads from that content, you have to write frequently.

One of the main problems is that some marketers simply don’t write enough content. They guess that one well-written blog will spark a deluge of traffic.

Marketers have to write regularly and constantly for an extended period of time.If you don’t have anyone on your team that has the ability to write every day, day after day, then find someone that can help. Creating content quickly is critical. Writing a blog shouldn’t take 5 hours. Get content formed quickly.

Each blog post won’t win a Pulitzer. Now, that does NOT mean that you should create terrible blog posts, but it does mean that 47 managers don’t need to read through each post to determine if it’s good enough for publication on your blog. 

You don’t need a Congressional mistake panel to approve your blogs. Don’t let bureaucracy get in the way of good content.
Hire someone who can do the job rapidly and well, and then let them do it.

3) Include CTAs on EVERY blog post

Encourage your readers to do something at the wrapping up of every blog. We had a 212% increase in leads per blog when we started creating CTAs and posting them at the bottom of the blog. We factually put CTA buttons on the bottom of every blog.
And other companies do it better than us. KISSmetrics essentially puts several short forms on the sides of the blogs and several CTAs.

4) Include Authorship and Share

When Matt Cutts says he is eager about rel=”author”. And when Cutts says he is excited about something, everyone should be excited about it.
“I think we’ll keep on to look at it as far as seeing how to use rel=”author” in ways that can improve the search experience.”

5) Do this for Several Months

Blogging to make leads is a marathon, not a sprint. It is hard. It is time-consuming. It takes inspiration and someone who can write quickly and well.

Even if you follow this 5 step formula with accuracy, your blog still probably won’t make leads for 1-3 months. But, slowly that will change. Finally you’ll notice a trickle of leads. You’ll notice an occasional click on your CTA button. You’ll notice a special White Paper download. Then you’ll start to notice an occasional phone call generated by your blog. 

Finally you’ll be able to track traffic, leads, and eventually customers from your blog.

Most important Google Changes Reveal the opportunity of SEO

Google is doing a sparkling job of approaching people away from tactical SEO behavior and toward a more strategic approach.

You could argue that "tactical SEO is dead", but that's not reasonably right. And don't run around saying "SEO is dead" because that is far from the truth, and I might just bawl at you.

Instead, let's take a few steps back and appreciate the big picture. Here's a look at the major developments, some of Google's initiatives driving this change, and the overall crash these changes will have on SEO.

1. '(Not Provided)'

Google made the move to make all organic searches secure starting September 23. This means we've lost the capability to get keyword data for users arriving to our websites from Google search.

Losing Google keyword data is sad for a number of reasons. These impacts publishers in many ways, including losing a precious tool for understanding what the intent of customers that come to their site, for conversion optimization, and much more.

For tactical SEO efforts, it just means that keywords data is harder to come by. There are ways to work around this, for now, but it just won't be fairly as simple as it used to be.

2. No PageRank Update since February

Previously, Google has updated the PageRank numbers shown in the Google Toolbar every 3 months ago or so, but those numbers haven't been updated since February. This means 8 months have gone by, or two updates have been skipped.

In addition, Google's famous Engineer Matt Cutts has said Toolbar PageRank won't be updated again this year, leading many to consider that PageRank is going away. I won't miss it because I don't look at PageRank often and I usually don't have a Google toolbar in my browser.

However, a lot of people still use it as a basic measurement of a site's prominence.

For sites with a home page that has PageRank 7 or higher, it may in fact be logical to assume that the site has some chops. Correspondingly, sites with a home page that has a PageRank of 3 or lower, it is either new, or probably a low quality experience. Stuff in the middle, you just don't know.

3. Hummingbird

There are a few fundamentals to Google's Hummingbird algorithm, announced in time for Google's official birthday, but like Caffeine before it, this is really a main platform change. Google has built a capability to understand conversational search queries much better than before.

:Hummingbird really changes the keyword game quite a bit. Over time, exact keyword matches will no longer be such a big contract.

The impact of this algorithm is likely to be quite large over the next 2 or so years. Net-net, they have radically reduced access to the raw data, and are rolling out technology that changes the way it all works at the same time!

4. Google+

Google launched Google+ June 28, 2011.

While it seemed to get off to a slow start primarily, many argue that it has developed a lot of thrust, and is growing rapidly. The data on Google+'s market share is pretty hard to parse, but there are some clear impacts on search, such as the display of modified results:

Hummingbird really changes the keyword game quite a bit. Over time, exact keyword matches will no longer be such a big deal.

The impact of this algorithm is likely to be quite large over the next 2 or so years. Net-net, they have radically reduced access to the raw data, and are rolling out technology that changes the way it all works at the same time.

5. Authorship

OK, authorship also isn't new but it is a part of a bigger picture. Google can use this to associate new pieces of content with the one who wrote it.

Over time, this data can be potentially used to measure which authors write stuff that draw a very sturdy response and give them a higher "Author Rank" .

We won't delve into the particulars of how Author Rank might work now, but you can read "Want to Rank in Google? Build Your Author Rank Now" for my thoughts on ways they could look at that.

That said, in the potential you can imagine that Google could use this as a ranking signal for queries where more comprehensive articles are likely to be a good response. Bottom line: your personal authority matters.

I also should mention Publisher Rank, the concept of building a site's authority, which is arguably more important. Getting this payoff depends on a holistic approach to building your authority.

6. In-Depth Articles

Google announced a new feature, in-depth articles August 6. 

This increases the payoff from Author Rank and Publisher Rank – there is a lot to be gained by developing both of these, assuming that Google actually does create it a ranking factor at some point. Note that I wrote some thoughts on how the role of in-depth articles could evolve.

Is There a Pattern Here?

Yes, there is. The data they have taken away has been in history used by publishers to optimize their SEO efforts in a very tactical manner.

How do I get higher PageRank? What are the keywords I should optimize for? Taking these things out of the picture will reduce the focus on these types of goals.

On the other side of the coin, the six major Google changes listed above are all moves that support more strategic behavior. Note that I didn't bring up Google Now, which is also a really big deal too, and it's another big piece of the Google plan, just not a major driver of the point I'm trying to make today.

All of these new pieces play a role in receiving people to focus on their authority, semantic relevance, and the user knowledge. Again, this is what Google wants.

The focus now is on accepting your target users, producing great content, establishing your authority and visibility, and providing a huge experience for the users of your site. Properly architecting your site so that the search engines can appreciate it, including using schema and related markup, addressing local search, and work of this type still matters, too.

But, the obsession with tactical items like PageRank and keywords is going to fade away. As Google tweaks the way their service operates, and look for ways to capture new signals, they do things that naturally push you in that direction. It isn't going to stop. Wait for more of the same going forward!

Google Webmaster- Great collection of free tools

 Google Webmaster Tools is a powerful collection of free tools that allow you to keep track of your website or blog – but informal users risk missing out on some of the best ways to use the stage.

  Here are some little-known or often-missed methods of change Google Webmaster Tools to suit your needs, starting from before you’ve even reached the console for a specific website.

 
Power Users

If you have a great number of websites to manage using Google Webmaster Tools, switch to Compact View on the homepage.
Click the list icon, next to the Sort options, and you can change the outlook so many more site profiles fit on to the home screen.

If you usually just click straight through to a site profile, this is one choice you may have missed – but it can streamline the page substantially for power users.

Notifications

The homepage is also where you can set up email notifications for any automatic site messages – just click on the Settings cog at the top-right, and click through to Webmaster Tools Preferences.

Regardless of its name, this page is all about site messages, allowing you to alter the default language if you wish, and to set up email notifications.
You can, if you choose, change the notification Type to ‘All issues’ for much more recurrent emails about your site health – helping to flag up things you might otherwise have missed, if you have a lot of profiles to manage.

 Authorship

At the time of script, the Labs section – where new features are beta tested to make a decision whether they should be included in the main Webmaster Tools suite – has an ‘Author stats’ page.

If you have set up Google Authorship, this allows you to view statistics for all of the pages that are linked with your Google+ profile and have been crawled and indexed by Google.
Click on the ‘Filters’ button for higher segmentation of this data by Search type, Location and Traffic – so, for example, you can see which are your best-performing pages on mobile devices in the UK, or in the middle of Image search users in the US, and so on.

Data on this page includes imitation, clickthroughs, CTR and average ranking – making it a powerful page if you are trying to decide the positive impact of setting up Google Authorship on your site.

 Additional Tools

The Additional Tools page is worth a look if you usually gloss over it – it is basically a list of links to services that can be beneficial to your web presence, such as setting up a Google Places page, or submitting your products to Google Product Search.

Site Profiles

Once you’ve clicked through to an personality site profile, the options available to you become much greater – and some of the methods we’ve previously mentioned above change, so it’s worth checking them again.

For instance, the Settings cog now has much more in-depth preferences, allowing you to link Google Webmaster Tools with the applicable site profile on Google Analytics, check your site verification details, and so on.

The Labs list should now also include more options than it did on the homepage, so again, determine whether any of those are value trying.

Google Analytics

If you linked your Google Analytics account as mentioned above, look out for hyperlinks from Webmaster Tools to Analytics.
The bottom of the Search Queries page is one example of where this occurs, and while it can be easy to miss, it gives you a direct judgment between the data collected by the two platforms.
Remember as well that the precise figures obtained may differ, due to the different methods used by each platform, so it’s significant to compare the two before drawing any conclusions about the success or failure of your web marketing.

Google Penguin & Webmaster Tools

The Google Penguin update was a major algorithm update designed to remove copy and keyword-stuffed content from the top of Google’s organic search results.
If your site was affected by the update, Webmaster Tools can help you to respond, addressing the nastiest infringing content first, and building a better library of site content to help you come back to the top rankings.

HTML Improvements

This option is found under ‘Search Appearance’ on the site dashboard and flags up frequent meta tag in rank including page titles and descriptions.
According to Google, these will not directly affect your search ranking, but giving a sole, descriptive title and description to each page is still good practice.

Detached URLs

If you have URLs that have been flagged by Google as copy or keyword-stuffed content, you may wish to remove them from the search index entirely, rather than risk having them damage your ranking.

Under ‘Google Index’, click ‘Remove URLs’ to submit a removal request – but make sure the page meets Google’s removal supplies first.
These require either that the page is deleted entirely or that it is blocked using robots.txt or a meta no index tag.

Click ‘Advanced’ and then check ‘Removed’ and hit the ‘Update’ button to see how many pages have been detached from your site, and when Google delisted them from its index.

URL Parameters

At last, you may wish to organize URL parameters if dynamic URLs put you at risk of having the same content come into view at multiple URLs, and therefore be identified as duplicates by Google.

‘URL Parameters’ is found under ‘Crawl’ and can tell Google what parameters are used in your URLs, so that they can be accounted for in its assessment of what is duplicate content, and what is simply the same content accessed vigorously.

This is an option that should be used carefully, to avoid delisting large sections of your site entirely, but it may be the best answer if dynamic URLs proved problematic following the Google Penguin update.The Google webmaster tools can help small businesses exploit their online presences.

Google Authorship

Some of the major goals of blogging and content strategies are to drive traffic, earn links, and to rank higher on Google. So, with Google Authorship & Author Rank being so significant today I am amazed at how many bloggers and website owners have still not embraced it. With Google Authorship, you can help improve rank while branding yourself as a respected writer in your field. Since Google altered its algorithms to provide more relevant search results, it is my belief that becoming an authority is vital to securing a high search rank today. All you need is a Google+ profile to get started and this very easy-to-follow Google Authorship eBook.

Add a Face to Your Work

Be proud of your work and let everyone see the face after the experience! By linking your online work to your Google+ profile, Google Authorship verifies you as the author. This will allow your Google+ image to appear beside search results where you’re the author. I don’t know about you, but when I search for some information online and I notice a professional picture beside a result, I am more inclined to click. Experts have already proven time and time again that some search results with an image have an advanced click rate than those without. Plus, the more searchers see your face, the more they think of you as a professional in your industry. 

Rank above Plagiarists

 As a matter of fact, plagiarized content often ranks higher than the original content on Google. When you set up yourself as the original author, Google ranks your content higher than any duplicate content. Instead of searchers finding plagiarists, they find you. Anything that helps with this battle is a win-win for everyone. Another benefit is, once you have an recognized audience by using Google Authorship, your fans are likely to let you know if they see your content published somewhere else under a different name. This gives you the chance to report the content to Google and help remove another plagiarist from the web.

Attach With Readers

I like connecting with my readers and many times I get the same people sharing, liking and promoting my blogs. Authorship makes it simple to connect with your followers and build a network. Readers can view my Google+ profile straight from Google search results to learn more about me. My profile not only lists blogs where I’m an author, but provides a link for readers to view my content through a custom search. Readers instantly discover who I am and if they want they can add me frankly to their circles if they use Google+. Set up your Google Authorship and this will give you a great opportunity to connect with your readers on a social platform they know and love.

Index earlier

If you have something significant to say or timely news you want to share and you want your content indexed quicker, link it to your Google+ profile. The Google Authorship program gives your linked content priority over other websites. The quicker you’re indexed; the sooner people will find your content. With millions of pieces of content published on a daily basis, you need some way to stand out from the rest. One of the most important tips I give my clients is, even with proper SEO, you could at rest be buried by the competition. If your content is indexed faster, searchers will find you before the competition, giving you a chance to build your audience. This advice is very expensive.

Author Rank

Google is beginning to realize Author Rank which ranks Google Authorship writers based on engagement and social factors. Those with a profile will rank higher than those without one. While rank will still be based on the content first and foremost, if you craft excellent content, Author Rank will help boost your overall Google search rank. While Google hasn’t implemented Author Rank fully yet, some aspects are already being used in Google’s algorithms. As Google perfects the new ranking system, you’ll see a greater boost in your rank. By using Authorship now rather than later it will help you build your readership and social media impact so you’ll be at the top of search results one time Author Rank is implemented in full. If you don’t believe me, read what Mark Traphagen writes about “Authorship Tips and Takeaways from Matt Cutt’s Video”.

If you want your content in face of more people and want to build your Google authority, joining Google+ and using Google Authorship is a must. That’s all I have to say on the matter!