As we know from our wide range of clients at Portland, how to manage on-line reputation is increasingly a central concern for companies and organisations. They want to know how they can ensure that on-line views of what they do are not distorted by unfair critic.
There is no single answer to this challenge. But when Google is usually the gateway to your on-line reputation, publishing quality content can help control what people read about you.
Quality is the important word here. It is not just what you publish but also the number of readers who like and share your content which determines your rank on search. And that means content which is insightful and unique.
But while you want people to share your content, you don’t want them to claim it as their own. If they do, it may not be you that gets the credit or, importantly, the higher ranking.
Google, fortunately, has recognised this as a problem as it is clearly in their interest as well to acknowledge those who produce quality content. So they have come up with Google Author rank which rewards content producers with more visibility on the search engine results page.
To get started with Google Author rank, these are some of the steps that your organisation can take:
1. Create a Google+ account for your organisation (if not already on this platform). When creating the profile, be sure to include a rich outline of what your organisation does and any photos and logos.
2. List all the sites that you author or contribute to on your Google+ profile. You should include your twitter profile and facebook too if you have these accounts.
3. Insert the tag <rel=”author” link=”your-googlplus-url” /> into your content on your blog or website template.
4. If there are individuals who contribute to the blog. Then, they can also indicate what blogs ad sites they publish to on their own profiles.
Once you have this in place, all you have to do is to continue publishing quality content that is optimised. Google and those who read your content will see that it is from a trusted source and this will contribute to improving your organisations rank on the search engine results page. If you have a number of authors writing for your blog or website, each individual can be set up as an author – great for building the profile of your organisation’s spokespeople.
There is, of course, understandable scepticism about the merit of adding yet another channel to your communications mix. It is scepticism which, up until now, we have shared at Portland. Even if you simply publish content and stay away from engagement on Google+, it is enough for now to establish your organisation as the originator of content.
To get started with Author rank, test the status of your blog now on this link:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets
Get started and link your Google+ profile here: