So far SEO experts had to worry mainly about PageRank. It is an important metric that measures the quality of a web page, which in turn affects the final web rank of the page. This metric along with page authority and domain authority gauges the overall web page quality. Earlier, the quality of content was determined by search engines based on the authority of the web page. Now Google has just made it official that a new metric known as AuthorRank will take into account the authority of the individual writing the content. Also known as AgentRank in the patent filed by Google, this quality metric will be taken into consideration when search results are generated. Experts predict that AuthorRank will bring about major changes in SEO in 2013.
How to establish AuthorRank
So how do you build and establish your AuthorRank? Your social media presence and influence will play a major role in deciding your AuthorRank. Use Google Authorship privileges to link the articles or content you have created on other domains to your Google+ profile with rich snippets. This will ensure that you get credit for all the web content you have created.
After the content is made available on Google+, the following factors determine the AuthorRank of the piece of content – quality of inbound links – comments it attracts on social networking sites – the influence or importance of the people leaving these comments – number of shares, likes, tweets, etc. and finally the relevancy of the people liking, sharing, tweeting, etc. the content. Basically, the more content the author creates on the same topic and the more people engage with that content – the higher the AuthorRank of that author for that content.
How to improve AuthorRank
As this metric will be of great importance in 2013, companies must improve the AuthorRank of their web content for proper SEO. Firstly, they must find people within their organizations who have already established their AuthorRank. The companies must then work on augmenting the AuthorRank of these people.
If companies do not have such people, they must utilize the services of content writing companies that have established AuthorRank. As a long term goal, they must start finding employees whose online reputations and AuthorRank can be built. Companies must be able to reach out to authors who are already authority figures on topics related to the brand image of the company, on the Internet. Companies are advised to place their content on other popular sites and blogs to increase chances of comments and engagement, which in turn will improve AuthorRank.
Most importantly, companies and their content creators must be more active on Google+. Although this social networking site is not as popular as Facebook or Twitter, this new metric will ensure that companies consider Google+ an important SEO factor in 2013.