In this post, we’ll explore 15 surprising digital marketing trends that you need to know. The charts below are pulled from Google Trends and show search interest over the last decade.
This is the phrase that is changing the way marketing is done. You’ll see a VERY close resemblance to the graph below for “HubSpot”, the all-in-one Inbound Marketing software (and marketing content giant). (more…)
Want to know how Google is going to get users to leave Facebook and use Google Plus? They are going to pay them to do it (indirectly).
Author Rank is only being talked about in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing circles at the moment, but the effects of the coming SEO earthquake it causes could be felt by everybody before it is over. It is not just a tool to improve their search engine. It is an asset they intend to use to take over social media. I’ll explain . . .
If you’ve followed social media over the last few years, you’ve seen Google launch round after round of social platforms, each with a characteristic belly-flop ending — Friend Connect, Lively, Wave, Buzz, and Plus. But slow down. Maybe we’ve written Plus off too quickly.
Plus launched in 2011 and didn’t gain a lot of marketshare. The tool itself seems to be excellent, but there wasn’t a good enough reason to leave Facebook and Twitter for the (more…)
UPDATE JULY 19, 2013: The information below was posted in January 2013. We have since seen a client’s author verification take place in 6 days. We used Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool to make sure the verification was set up correctly and that may have sped the process up. Now back to our previous post . . .
So how long does it take author info to show up in Google results? We’ve seen this take months (example 1 example 2), but our answer is 3 weeks. We would love to think that Google just loves us that much more than the other folks, but it may just be that they are speeding the process up as it becomes more refined.
We made the changes on December 21. We’ve checked daily (weekdays) since then and noticed it showing up yesterday, Monday, Jan 14. That’s actually 24 days, but we’ll give Google the benefit of the doubt and say it happened when we weren’t watching over the weekend, which is right at 3 weeks.
Here’s a quick look at how the authorship verification looks in SERPs . . .
NOTE: In Google’s example image of this author display, the author’s name shows up in bright blue. The example author is in over 800,000 Google+ Circles, which may have something to do with his name displaying in a different color than mine. 🙂
Google’s authorship verification system involves linking your Google+ Profile to any content that you write. You can do this adding the site to your “Contributes To” section in Google+, and either verifying a branded email address with site itself or inserting a “rel=author” code snippet to any page with your content. We inserted the code snippet.
[sam id=”10″ codes=”true”]
Besides being vain and liking having your picture show up on a SERP, what advantage is there to bothering with Author Verification?
There is a lot of strong speculation that “Author Rank” will play heavily into Google’s algorithm very soon (they’ve been working on it for years) and that may make huge waves in the SEO industry.
What we do know is that authorship verification means that Google trusts you and that you should receive more click-thrus because of your picture and profile info showing up in SERPs, regardless of if it actually affects the rankings themselves.
Do your blog a favor and take just a few quick minutes to verify your authorship. And let us know how long it takes in the comments.