When trying to rank well on Google, you want to get as many factors working for you as possible. If you can use a few effective techniques your competitors overlook, so much the better. Keep reading for some ideas.
I saw these ideas in an article by Neil Patel that appeared on Search Engine Journal. He goes into great detail explaining why you should use these techniques and what you can gain from them. If anything I tell you here piques your curiosity, I suggest you check out that piece.
We'll start with a ranking factor that's near and dear to every writer's heart: authorship markup. Google has been supporting authorship markup since the middle of last year. Even today, not everyone uses it, though you'll find it on most of the major publishing websites. If you run a site with authored content, you'll want to use it as well.
So how does it work? Google provides information on the technical details of authorship markup (), so you can implement it on your own site. But what do you gain? Patel showed an image from a search he performed which displayed an author's thumbnail picture - in this case, Joost de Valk - underneath the link to de Valk's article. Next to de Valk's picture, Google displayed his name as an active link, listed how many Google+ circles he was in, and finally included a link for "more by Joost de Valk."
I don't need to tell you that anything extra that catches the eyes of searchers may be worth doing, but you can already see that this gives you something special. Searchers can see that there's a real person behind your articles; that builds trust. Content farm postings usually don't list authors on their pages, so right away this separates your site from the fluff.
Bill Slawski at SEO by the Sea sees even more positives to using authorship markup. Based on some Google patents he's read, he believes the search engine will take it further. For example, if you do a guest post and have an authorship markup profile, authorship markup could let you connect all of your content so readers can follow you wherever you blog. Slawski also thinks that authorship markup could stop content scrapers in their tracks - if Google crawls both pages and finds authorship markup on one, it might recognize that as the original page, thus keeping the scrapers from outranking you.
These are just two possibilities that Slawski listed. If Google takes the next step and actually starts using author badges, there's even greater potential. But for right now, adding authorship markup will at least give your pages more authority, increase reader trust, and might increase your click-through rate even if you're not at the top of the SERPs - because that author thumbnail really does make a result stand out.
Google Optimization 
