I’m sure this isn’t the first time you’ve heard this:  Content is King, Links are Queen.  It’s the same mantra that’s been said for many years throughout the SEO industry.  But there’s a new player in town – Google Authorship.

Back in early 2013, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said,

Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification, which will result in most users naturally clicking on the top verified results. The true cost of remaining anonymous, then, might be irrelevance.

Wow.

If you play in Google’s sandbox, you’ll get rewarded.

It’s not an issue of choosing sides, but rather an issue of playing or not playing.  If you play Google’s game, you’ll get rewarded.  Don’t play, and your competitor does, he wins instead.  So if you both write articles about orange widgets, and he has Authorship and you don’t, guess who’s going to rank better? Not you.

Guest Blogging for Links

It’s been a long time practice that being a contributor to other websites is a great way to build up your link profile.  In the past, when you wrote an article for a website, typically you’d get a link back to your site, usually in the byline.  The exchange was content for link.

But guest blogging has changed, and it’s growing by leaps and bounds.  I’ve heard several cases recently where guest bloggers are now simply asking for authorship credit on a website that they contribute to instead of any kind of link at all.  Building up their ‘Author Rank’ is the new way of getting more attention, and thus more traffic.  The exchange is now content for authorship credit.

More Traffic for Those That Play Along

You’ve probably already unknowingly given some more of your attention to someone that has their Google Authorship profile set up.  One of the cool things that signing up for Authorship does is that it pulls your picture and puts it into the natural search results, drawing more attention to your post versus the other ‘drab’  results.

As you can see, the picture sets this result apart from the others.  Studies have shown that authorship-related SERP results get more click-throughs than those without.  In this guy’s case, a 484% increase! So what’s stopping you?

Get Signed Up for Google Authorship

If you haven’t signed up for Google Plus, or Google Authorship, I highly recommend you do so.  And if your website is on WordPress, I shamelessly recommend that you get my eBook “How to Set Up Google Authorship for Your WordPress Website” and follow the simple steps to completion.

And if not, I recommend you get started at the official Google Authorship page – this will get you going in the right direction!

Verifying Your Authorship

Once you’ve gone through the process of verifying your authorship on your website, the easiest way to see if it’s working correctly is to use Google’s free Snippet Testing Tool.  Simply plug in a URL to one of your blogs and it will quickly tell you if you’ve done it correctly or not.