Large scale dynamic sites are notoriously difficult to optimize for search engines without ongoing interaction and training of everyone who touches every aspect of site functionality, content and structure. It’s possible for minor changes in site architecture to strongly affect crawlability for search engines, remote ad servers can slow page load speed, changes in algorithms can surface old issues, and great new ideas break old functionality which was targeting different goals.
When I saw the enterprise seo graphic below, my work to resolve these kinds of issues was laid out and made very easy to communicate to others who wonder what the value is in standards dictated by search engines when it doesn’t directly and immediately affect traffic. I love being able to point to this well laid out infographic and say to multiple teams – do you recall when we did that arcane thing with tags that users can’t see, that don’t change site functionality and made no sense to the original goals? Well here is where that applies and by the way – we saw a 38% improvement in conversion after this change.
See if this infographic makes it easier to explain your process to the product team, the engineering team, the content team and the executive team.
Courtesy of: RKG | Rimm-Kaufman Group
I’ve been attempting to evangelize for authorship, since I’ve always been a big believer in content production and work with editorial teams consistently. Interesting to note that none of the writers or editors I’ve spoken with have heard of authorship markup and that they often question the value of author rank to them. “What’s In It For Me?” (WIIFM) seems to dominate initial conversations and I understand that. Content producers prefer to be judged by their audience before worrying about search engines.
I think it odd that Google doesn’t evangelize authorship with writers, editors and online publishers in a more visible way. SEO’s are carrying that torch now, because we are the first point of reference for all things search. Unless the editorial team has an SEO copywriter among them.
So thank you to BlueGlass for the educational tool (the infographic below) I’ll be using routinely to make the case among content production types to show benefits to authors of being recognized and properly attributed. The benefit of protecting against content theft will probably be on the top of the list for writers looking for the WIIFM. I’ll send them to the section labeled “Why Use Rel=Author?” below which includes:
Gathering all your content in search result page
All rel=Author Content in search results points to Authors’ Google Profile
Click Through is higher on attributed articles
Lends authority and credibility to Authored posts
Reduced risk of plagiarized content outranking yours
Seems great – how do you do it? This is where writers will stop and head to engineering or back to SEO for help making it happen in the code. Blueglass has some help there as well with suggestion to visit Google Profiles page to create the author profile, where writers will add their own photo and provide links to places they contribute content. Then visit Google Profile Button Page where you’ll get the code to add to the author blog or to their bio page at your company.
Now comes the fun part for writers – once Google has re-indexed the pages you’ve added that code to – authors will see their photo start to show up in search results.
There will be roadblocks and stalls as writers find satisfactory photos or find it difficult to get external sites that publish their content to add the “Rel=Author” tags to their articles or blog posts – but it will eventually be made simpler as authorship plugins become more common for all platforms and third-party tools solve coding challenges for engineering teams looking for scalable ways to incorporate rel=author on large sites. Until then – SEO needs to help writers get authorship credit.
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