What is author SEO, and why should you bother implementing it?
One of the criteria Google uses to rank content is its E-E-A-T content quality guidelines. And these completely depend on author SEO.
In this article, we’ll show you what author SEO is, its importance, and how to implement it so you meet Google’s E-E-A-T standards.
In This Article
What is Author SEO?
Author SEO is the practice of optimizing your online presence to improve your visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) when people search for your name or work. It’s also essential in helping you rank your content for the topics you write about. This is particularly true for YMYL (your money, your life) niches.
Why is Author SEO Important?
One reason author SEO is important is because it helps you meet Google’s E-E-A-T content guidelines. To ensure users get the best experience when searching for information online, Google introduced E-E-A-T in their Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines. These are to ensure the content published online is of high quality. E-E-A-T is an acronym that stands for:
- Experience refers to the first-hand experiences the author or other team members have with that particular topic.
- Expertise refers to the expertise of the creator of the main content.
- Authoritativeness refers to the authoritativeness of the main content creator, the content, and the website on which the content is published.
- Trustworthiness Refers to the trustworthiness of the main content creator, the content itself, and the website it’s published on.
The purpose of these standards is to help improve the quality of content published on the web. In addition, it helps ensure that content is accurate and helpful to users.
While not a direct ranking factor, aligning with Google’s E-E-A-T content quality guidelines does give your content an advantage over your competitors.
How to Use the Author SEO Module in WordPress
Step 1: Install All In One SEO (AIOSEO)
The first step to impactful author SEO is downloading and installing All In One SEO (AIOSEO).
AIOSEO is a powerful, easy-to-use SEO plugin boasting over 3 million active installs. That means millions of smart bloggers and marketers use AIOSEO to help them boost their search engine rankings and drive qualified traffic to their blogs. The plugin has many powerful features and modules designed to help you properly configure your SEO settings. Examples include:
- Cornerstone Content: Easily build topic clusters and enhance your topical authority and semantic SEO strategy.
- SEO Revisions: Track any changes you make to your site and see their impact on your SEO. Plus, you get to see on a timeline how Google updates affect your site.
- Advanced Robots.txt Generator: Easily generate and customize your robots.txt file for better crawling and indexing.
- TruSEO Highlighter: Makes it easy to spot on-page SEO issues and gives recommendations for fixing them.
- Next-gen Schema generator: This no-code schema generator enables users to generate and output any schema markup on your site.
- Redirection Manager: Helps you manage redirects and eliminate 404 errors, making it easier for search engines to crawl and index your site.
- Link Assistant: Powerful internal linking tool that automates building links between pages on your site. It also gives you an audit of outbound links.
- SEO Preview: This gives you an overview of your search and social snippets and general SEO so you can improve your optimization.
- IndexNow: For fast indexing on search engines that support the IndexNow protocol (like Bing and Yandex).
- Sitemap generator: Automatically generate different types of sitemaps to notify all search engines of any updates on your site.
- And more
AIOSEO also has many other features to help you boost your local SEO, on-page SEO, and technical SEO. And, if you’re a WooCommerce user, AIOSEO has a tailor-made WooCommerce SEO module to help you rank your online store higher in search rankings.
Besides these, AIOSEO has a dedicated Author SEO module to help you implement Google E-E-A-T right in WordPress.
For step-by-step instructions on how to install AIOSEO, check out our installation guide.
Step 2: Create a User Profile
If you haven’t set up user profiles on your WordPress site yet, now would be a great time. To do that, go to your WordPress dashboard » Users » Add New User.
Fill in all the required information and click the Add New User button.
And that’s it! You’ve added a user profile.
Step 3: Add Author Information in the Author SEO Section
With AIOSEO installed and your user profiles set up, the next step is to go to the Author SEO section in the Users menu of your WordPress dashboard.
In the Author SEO section, you can add an author’s information to help validate your E-E-A-T signals.
Some of the author info you can add include
- Alumni Of
- Employer
- Job Title
The best part is that AIOSEO outputs JSON schema for this information. As a result, search engines can easily understand it and consider it when ranking your content.
Besides your credentials and role in your organization, you can also add categories of your areas of expertise.
All this information points to your experience and expertise in your field.
The author bio section allows you to add your author image, an excerpt, and a full bio.
Coupled with the JSON schema markup, this information proves to search engines that you’re qualified to talk about the subject. This helps you rank higher in searches around your keyword.
Step 4: Add Author Blocks in Your Posts
Once you’ve filled in your author information, the next step to impactful author SEO is to add AIOSEO’s author blocks to your posts. These blocks help you inject the information from the Author SEO section into a post.
AIOSEO supports 2 main types of author blocks:
The Written By Author Block
One way of leveraging your bio is by adding an Author Name or Written By author block. This gives a very brief summary of the post’s author.
Hovering over the author’s name reveals a tooltip with a mini bio.
To add this block, open your post in editor mode, click where you want to place it and insert the block.
This block pulls from the Author Excerpt field in your Author SEO input.
The Author Bio Block
You can also add an author bio at the bottom of your page. By default, this will be a compact bio.
This gives a brief summary of the author. It also:
- Links to the author’s archive page (page with all the author’s articles)
- Showcases your areas of expertise
- Links to your social media accounts
You can display the full bio by going to the Author Bio block settings and turning the Show Compact Author Bio toggle off.
This results in your full bio being displayed:
Both the Author Name and Author Bio blocks help you demonstrate your expertise, experience, authority, and trustworthiness. As a result, meeting Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines is easier.
Trust is one of the key pillars in Google’s E-E-A-T content guidelines. You can gain it from your readers by letting them know who you are and your areas of expertise.
Step 5: Add Reviewer Block (Optional)
Another block you can add using AIOSEO’s Author SEO module is the Reviewer block. Adding a reviewer is an excellent way to boost credibility and further augment your E-E-A-T signals.
This is particularly important for YMYL articles, where you need to demonstrate that your content is accurate, up-to-date, and reliable. A reviewer also shows that your content is backed up by an expert and can be trusted.
To add a reviewer block, open your post in editor mode, click where you want to add it and insert the block.
Note: You’ll need to have the reviewer’s profile in the Users and Author SEO sections.
And that’s it!
You’ve implemented Author SEO and demonstrated Google E-E-A-T signals in WordPress.
Author SEO: Your FAQs Answered
What is Author SEO?
Author SEO refers to the practice of optimizing your online presence and boosting your Google E-E-A-T signals. This gives you an edge and helps to enhance your visibility in search engine results. Author SEO can include optimizing your author bios and showcasing your experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T). It also involves optimizing your social media profiles to showcase your expertise.
Why is Author SEO important?
Author SEO is essential for increasing discoverability and building an audience. It also helps you meet Google’s E-E-A-T standards, resulting in better rankings on SERPs.
Which tool can help me with my author SEO?
The best tool for author SEO is All In One SEO (AIOSEO). It’s a powerful plugin that can help you implement Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines right in WordPress. The plugin also has many other modules to help with other aspects of on-page SEO and technical SEO.
We hope this post has helped you know what author SEO is and how to implement it in WordPress. You may also want to check out other articles on our blog, like our practical guide to EEAT and YMYL, our beginners’ guide to SEO or our ultimate WordPress SEO checklist.
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