Author Stats via Google Webmaster Tools
Taking a look at the Labs feature in Google Webmaster Tools can show you a more than a few things that can help you optimize your blog – this won’t take too much of your time (at least the first few parts) but you’ll want to not skip over them as part of your weekly (or monthly?) review.
The first part is Author Stats with can help you take a look at particular posts and their impact on search. From Google themselves:
Google is piloting the display of author information in search results to help users discover great content. This feature is being rolled out gradually and will be implemented algorithmically, so author information will not always display in search results.
To identify the author of a blog or article, Google checks for a connection between the content page (such as an article), an author page, and a Google Profile. Authorship markup uses the
attribute (part of the open HTML5 standard) in links to indicate the relationship between a content page and an author page.
The point is that Authorship will become a more influential marker of SEO and traffic generation. This makes sense as it’ll help establish authority more quickly for the source of the post. If you need any more thoughts from the engineers themselves then you can review this 9 minute clip here:
[tentblogger-youtube FgFb6Y-UJUI]
Google Custom Search
The next section is detailing the installation and management of Google Custom Search. I already have a detailed post on how to install and use this on your blog. Review this blog post here for more information.
It is neat to have it directly embedded into Google Webmasters but I’ve opted to have it sit directly on GCS’s dashboard. You can choose either one and be fine. The point, though, is that I really like GCS and I think it’s a powerful tool for using for your own internal blog searching.
Neato!
Google Site Performance
Google Site Performance is great as it gives you the opportunity to really optimize the speed of your blog which we know already impacts your search engine quality and returns. If you need a refresher then review this post here.
Spending time working through your performance will help you have better results – this is not to be taken lightly!
And sure, there’s always room for improvement but the more time you spend you’ll learn not only more about your blog but you’re learn more of the mechanics of the blog software that will help maximize your use of it.
If you have any questions please let me know!
[This is part of the Bloggers Guide to Google Webmaster Tools.]
I’m not nerdy enough. The video didn’t make sense. Any help with this rel=author thing? 1) What and where should I put this? 2) should I use G+ profile when I guest post?
all good. no problem…! you could put it on the top of your blog. or sidebar.
I don’t know if this worked, but what I did, Brent, was go to this part of the site:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1408986
and chose Option 2. “Link your content to your Google Profile, and vice versa”
That gave me a snipped of code that I put on my website (you can see it at the bottom of the right-hand column. It’s the G+ symbol.)
Then I went back into my Google profile and entered the URL to my website. For some reason, Google wanted me to enter it twice before it showed up on my profile page (as “Contributing to” Planetpeschel).
I don’t know if this worked. The “rich snippets testing tool” indicated not, but it also said it may take awhile for Google to check my site (or, it might be looking for the rel=”me” in my code, whereas Google gave me rel=”author”. I dont know if this means anything or not, but it is what it is).
As for Google’s custom search, I understand it’s supposed to be an option under the Labs label (below “Author stats”), but I didn’t see it on my page.
Oh, forgot to mention, regarding the snippet of code, I use WordPress, so I created a Text Widget, put the code in there, and placed it at the bottom of the column on my blog page.
good thoughts bill! thanks for the help!
A very Nice article for W-Master. I really like this thin. Google Webmaster is improving day by day. Why Bing is soo slow in indexing compare to indexing.
bing… ew….
Another great article in this series.
I like the emphasis Google is placing on virtual signals of a real person and the true influence they have online and offline. I believe as this is developed it will really help make the connection between those two elements.
this is a good signal, you’re right.
I started linking via comments on blogs which has helped with my Google organic traffic but I still get only a touch from Bing. Does Bing have something like LABS or Diagnostics which can help you find the problems that Bing has with a site?
I am using wordpress seo on my site which seems to help focus me on keywords, meta descriptions, anchor text, etc but doesn’t seem again to help at all with Bing.
Does this sound normal or Bing?
Thanks
not sure. they don’t have nearly as good as google webmaster. i’m not a big fan of bing… so i leave it alone a lot.
Is there a way to update my Google blog search result snippet using the webmaster tools or something similar? It seems like after updating to Standard Theme 3 that my snippet is jacked up. (Google Search Ryan Wakefield)