Claiming Google Authorship on non-blog content

At developerWorks, most of our content is in the form of articles and tutorials rather than blogs.  We want to enable our authors to claim ownership in Google for this content, in addition to their blogs.  

An article or tutorial published on dW is, in actuality, a polished blog entry.. albeit a blog with only one or two entries for some of our authors.  But they should still take ownership.

Most of the methods I found online required linking from the blog entry, to an "About" (the author) page, and then from the "About" page to the person's Google+ profile.  We don't have about author pages on dW, so this method allowing each content file to link back directly to the Google+ profile is a much better fit.

There are claims that enabling Google Authorship, and thus enhancing the SERPs display, can increase click-throughs by 150%.  I find that exciting, but a little hard to believe.   As our editing team implements Google authorship on specific articles and tutorials, I'll track traffic trends and see what happens.

For the record, here is the process:

1. Author creates Google+ profile

2. Author lists developerWorks (www.ibm.com/developerworks/) in the "Contributes to" area of the about page.

3. Author provides Google+ profile to our editors for inclusion in the article or tutorial xml source

4. The XSLT stylesheet processes the Google+ profile element when rendering the html.  If there is only one author listed for the article or tutorial, a link to the authors Google+ profile (with ?rel=author appended to the url).

The link shows up in the author overlay as shown below:

SEO Best Practices for content editors

Part of my job is educating the editorial teams on SEO Best Practices.  I'll use this post to collect from my ever widening and wandering perusal of SEO articles.

HTML head tags that matter

    - from SEOmoz

1. Title tag - use the preferred keyword or keyword phrase at the first of the title tag. 

2. Meta description - not used in ranking by any search engines; they are important in the snippets that show up in organic search results.  Use the keyword, as it is bolded in the SERPs.

3. Meta keywords - fuhgeddaboudit.  Nobody uses it for anything sigificant, if at all.

4. Meta robots - index, follow for the most part.  We use noindex, nofollow on our 404 pages and other maintenance pages.  But otherwise, we want to encourage the crawler to continue throught the site.

5. Canonical URL tag - this I have to read a little more about.  I'll put together a future post on this.  The guidance says if site is large and complex, rel=canonical can prevent duplicates.  I wonder if we might have some issues in our community where content display can be modified dynamically.

URL recommendations

    - from SEOmoz

1. Keep urls short and readable.

2. If possible, use keywords in the url.  Avoid unnecessary internal verbage in the url      /folders/archive/meetings/archived_meetings.html

3. Search engines prefer use of pages over subdomains.   So, they recommend using a subfolder beneath your top domain.. rather than a separate subdomain. 

I'm going to have to do a little reading about subdomains before I understand this recommendation.  But, here is a good starting article.
 
4. Use hyphens not underscores to separate words in a url.  So

   ...com/bicycling-the-himalayas  NOT    ....com/bicycling_the_himalayas.  

Optimizing page content for specific keyword(s)    

- from SEOmoz

1. Use the keyword in the title tag at least once.

2. Use the keyword once near the top of the page.  

3. Use the keyword 2-3 times within the body copy, preferrably within the first 50 words of the body copy.      Also, use variations of the keyword in the body text.  So for example, "NC bicycling"  could be "bicycling in North Carolina"  or "NC bike clubs"

4. Use the keyword at least once in the alt attribute and the filename of an image on the page.  Interestingly, they said this would help for users looking for your content uses the images search utility on google.

5. Use the keyword once in the url.

6. Use it at least once in the meta description content.

7. H1 tags are showing less correlation with top rankings, but still good practice to use keyword in the h1 tag.

8. Consider using the keyword in bold and/or italics within the body tag once if possible.  There is slight evidence that bolding or italicizing the keyword may carry a small amount of SEO weight.   But, only do this if it makes sense within the context of page content.