How to Write an Author Bio: E-A-T, SEO Tips & Great Examples

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Since the disruptive algorithm update some in the industry call the “ Medic Update ,” SEO professionals have seen consecutive broad core algorithm updates from Google.

The search engine has indicated that “there is no ‘fix’” required to recover from these types of updates.

However, some SEO pros have put forward convincing studies, including this one from Lily Ray, that not demonstrating E-A-T (Expertise, Authority, and Trust) in a site’s content can be a demolishing factor in its search engine visibility.

In fact, Google mentions E-A-T 137 times in the current iteration of its 167-page search quality raters guidelines . It also advises that raters check to see if the page says who the author is and lists their biography and credentials.

We must not take the quality raters guidelines as indicators of ranking signals, as they do not directly influence rankings.

And Google has confirmed that they do not rank websites based on author reputation.

So why even care about author bios for SEO? In this column, you’ll learn why author bios matter and how to write an SEO-friendly author bio.

You’ll also find writing tips and an author bio template to help you get started. Author Authority and Google

Google’s John Mueller downplayed the necessity of author bio pages for SEO. He has suggested that they do help, but are more for user experience. “With regards to author pages and expertise, authority and trustworthiness, that’s something where I’d recommend checking that out with your users and doing maybe a short user study, specifically for your set up, for the different set ups that you have, trying to figure out how you can best show that the people who are creating content for your website, they’re really great people, they’re people who know what they’re talking about, they have credentials or whatever is relevant within your field.” But Google has always cared about author authority.

Take the idea of “author rank” for a start.This was discussed by Bill Slawski when Google filed its Agent rank patent in 2005 .The idea was that the “reputation scores of all of the people who put together the content of a page played a role in the ranking of that page.”Then in 2011, Google announced its authorship markup , “a way to connect authors with their content on the web.”Back then, marking up author pages with an accompanying Google Plus profile link using Schema.org’s rel=”author” and rel=”me” was standard practice.Authorship markup never claimed to offer any direct ranking benefit.Instead, it was put forward as a means to help search engines have more confidence about the author’s identity and “highlight authors in search results.”Google long ago stopped showing authorship in search results and shut down Google Plus .Despite this, their recent announcement on how they rank news sources revealed ongoing interest in authorship on the search engine’s part.It […]

Full article on original website: www.searchenginejournal.com