How to setup your Google Authorship correctly

I was intending to write this post for some time now, however this brilliant infographic by Mervik Haums was available and its a great resource of tips of getting your Google+ Authorship setup.

Google Authorship Checklist

To put this in a nutshell,

  1. Ensure you have put your best DP on your Google+ profile
  2. In the post you are writing, ensure that your name is displayed as the anchor text with a link pointing to your Author Profile with rel=author
  3. In your Author Profile, have a link to your Google+ profile with rel=me

I did this the earlier day for Good Home Advisor, and it worked within the next couple of days.

PS – Google Authorship has been nerfed by Google and the data is no longer available. Just one more example in the SEO industry when everyone starts abusing a particular rule, Google nerfs it!

Checklist for International SEO

international seo checklist

I always get into a quandary when it comes to setting up the SEO strategy for a site which spans across multiple geographies. What would the best course of action be, to use sub-directories and depend on the equity of the main site, or to spawn separate Top Level Domains (TLDs) and increase the quanta of work.

In fact sometimes this becomes a case of Analysis-Paralysis … inaction which comes from considering too many pros and cons.

This is where Aleyda Solis has shined through with a simple infographic for people like me. Here’s the gist of this, and that’s why I love this infographic –

If you have content for all the different TLDs, then go ahead with multiple TLDs since that’s the best approach. If you do not have that much content, then you can use language based sub-directories with the hreflang attribute and meta content language.