Solid Advice on Writing for the Web: Part Two

Part 2 of 2: How to have your writing found on the web

If you build it, they won’t just come

Now that you’ve used Part One to create an inspired, easy-to-digest, compelling piece of original content, it would be nice if people actually read it, right? While the Field of Dreams mentality may work for established authors and well-known websites, most of us need to promote and optimize our content to avoid having it slip into internet obscurity.

Steps after you publish

 Optimize Keywords

Scan through your content and pick the main topics or phrases in your article that would likely be searched on Google. Plug those terms into Google Adwords’ free keyword selection tool to determine whether your headings and main topics need to be refined or generalized depending on the competition and quantity of global/local monthly searches. For example, the subheading/URL of this article was altered from “Getting your content found on the web” to “How to have your writing found on the web” after noticing the original heading was contending with the highly competitive keyword listings of SEO tips and website optimization. ­

Adapt Your Status Updates

It’s easy to merely post the title of your blog post to your social networks. Don’t do that. To obtain the most traffic from your status updates, try to pose a question that is answered by your article and tailor it to each social community. This may mean multiple updates on different days and at different times to see meaningful results. We suggest sticking to the following social platforms to promote your content (in order of importance): Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Here’s a helpful infographic that dives into each platform’s audience groups, personas, and surfing habits to help you customize your status updates.

Seek and Assist

Proving relevant, researched support that directs traffic toward your content is a great way to build traffic and Twitter/Google+ followers, too, for that matter. Simply do a little digging on Twitter and Google+ for your topic and share your post with people who are asking for guidance. The trick here is that your topic should be answering questions and providing original ideas and resources. If you’re finding that “there are a lot of other articles out there just like mine,” you may need to take another look at your topic and decide why anyone would care to read it.

Google Authorship and Author Rank

You aren’t a robot. You don’t churn out ten, 500-word articles a day and then do it all again tomorrow—or at least you shouldn’t.  You spent time brainstorming, researching, writing, editing, and promoting your content—and you are proud of it. Google wants to reward you for your effort and punish the anonymous writers who pump out poor content crafted only for link building. Bottom-line, Google wants to promote great writers who create great content they stand behind.

Authorship vs. Author Rank

There is a great deal of confusion surrounding Author Rank and Authorship markup—first off, they’re NOT the same thing. Authorship markup is the method Google is currently using to display authorship information in search results for the content you create. For example:

Author Rank, on the other hand, is an aspect of Google’s search algorithm, rumored to be implemented in the future. Currently, there is only speculation and not enough data to define precisely how it works—A. J. Kohn, an experienced marketing executive with a successful track record spanning nearly 20 years, explains it like this:

How to Set Up Authorship

It’s a simple three-step process:

• Install “Wordpress SEO by Yoast” on the sites that you contribute to
• Add your Google+ profile URL within the “Users” section on sites you contribute to
• In your Google+ profile’s “About” section, add the site’s URL you contribute to within the ”Contributor to” section.

For more information, here’s Google’s tutorial

TL;DR

Through Google Authorship, Google essentially wants to make sure you’re a real human being and someone who is willing to put your name on the line for the content you create.

With Google+ growing and Authorship in place, it’s only a matter of time until we see Author Rank rolled out.

In the meantime, keep creating enthralling content, set up your Authorship, and promote and optimize your content.