Content, Guest Blogging, Authorship Markup And Social Signals

Author : Bharati Ahuja Content, Authorship and social signals seem to be the buzz for the SEO blogs today .The herd mentality in the SEO Industry is very common. Google announces a few features and makes certain announcements on the Google official blog and all the so called SEOs make certain presumptions by reading other blogs and go on a writing spree further. All this in fact is just causing more confusion and is misleading many people in the SEO Industry who call themselves SEOs but do not understand the true meaning of SEO Recently, · Matt Cutts wrote a post about Guest Posting http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/guest-blogging/ · Google refined the SERPs by restricting the rich snippets by 15-20%. For reference, here’s exactly what Cutts said at Pubcon in October 2013: We want to make sure that the people who we show as authors are high quality authors. And so we’re looking at the process of possibly tightening that up. It turns out if we reduce the amount of authorship we are showing by just about 10 or 15 percent, we’re radically able to improve the quality of the authors that we show. Which is another nice signal for those searchers and users who are typing into Google and say, “Ah, I see this picture, I see this person is an author. This is something I can trust. This is content that I really want to see.” So it’s not just going to be about the markup; it’s going to be about the quality of the author. · Matt Cutts openly declared that Twitter and Facebook signals are not integrated in the search algorithm and they are indexed like any other web page on the internet. Hence what should a genuine SEO takeaway from all this? I think the above mentioned happenings are all inter-connected. The major takeaways from these series of announcements and changes are as follows: 1. The authorship mark up which gave the perk of having their pics. Displayed in SERPs by just adding a piece of code polluted and diluted the quality of search results. Adding authorship markup does not guarantee the authority of the author on the topic. 2. To earn the benefit of getting the author pic. Displayed in SERPs only adding code is not enough. One needs to write quality content and prove his authority . 3. The authorship markup gives the content writer or brand an identity but if the content is shared by multiple users and authority accounts of that relevant industry then it adds to the goodwill and generates an authority factor. 4. Writing Guest posts is not wrong but writing low quality guest posts just to get links back is wrong and falls under the category of spam. 5. If you write in-depth posts and share insights and detailed information about the topics related to your industry then it helps the author gain a wider out reach and is not considered spam. In fact guest posting in-depth article on authority blogs will boost the search presence of such an author. 6. Hence, guest posting is not detrimental to search presence but the purpose behind it makes it right or wrong. 7. The quality of content, the frequency and the engagement determine the overall authority. 8. If you create content using high quality standards and it has in-depth information about a topic, then it will be shared by people and referred by other sites, which will add to the connectivity and relevance then it has the potential to have a high authority and trust factor – making it a valuable resource Google will be unable to ignore. 9. Currently Twitter and FB social signals are not being integrated into the ranking algorithm but the pages are getting indexed and those pages may have quality links to your site URLs which in the long run can improve search presence. 10. A social media presence even if does not give you any direct benefit for search bring in targeted referral traffic which in the long run can affect the search presence as Google does have referral traffic metric in analytics. 11. Google+ account is your passport for your web identity. As all the Google products are merging into this account one cannot ignore Google+. Its not only a social media site but also has the local, reviews, business pages, images, videos, community conversations, etc signals woven into it. 12. Measure and monitor the progress of the site via Google Webmaster Tools, Bing Webmaster Tools and Google analytics. 13. There is no quick fix for optimizing your site for search engines but it is all about earning the search presence via overall quality web presence. If you have an overall good web presence then you can have a presence in Google results there is no vice versa. 14. Work out a strategy to gain quality web presence rather than looking out for quick fixes on the site for ranking in SERPs. 15. Guest posting, on-page optimization, social media presence, commenting on blogs, etc. all will work positively if done with the right purpose of getting your online identity get correlated to quality content by adding in-depth insight to any topic and for reaching out to the right audience. 16. Technical SEO adds to the momentum of the on-page and off-page factors. As technical factors of the site ensure the correct crawling and indexing of the site which in the long run determine the direction in which the site is heading to on the search engines. The only way to get quality search presence is to focus on all factors qualitatively. January 27, 2014