Structured Data: Content, Rich Snippets & Authorship vs. Author Rank

Over the past few months, webmasters have noticed a rapid change in search as well as in social media marketing techniques. This evolution has brought a change in the way webmasters produce and consume content and data.

1. Relevant content and structured data

Data exists in different formats such as unstructured, semi-structured & structured data. Before stepping into the structured data and markup in search, as the first step you need to build up relevant, targeted, and engaging content.
When you’re thinking about marking up the content on your website, you have to consider both structured data and content conversations factors primarily. So, that search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing indexes your content in a unique way. Google clearly instructed webmasters to focus mainly on quality content along with structured data in GWT during panda updates.
As a marketer, your job is to ensure whether site is visible and have relevant results in SERPS. In addition, both structured data and semantic markup allows search engines to crawl more effectively by providing websites data and content structure.
Before crawling website, Semantic markup enables search engines to understand about the content format.
As well as, structured data enables search engine to understand about what the website content is about. In addition, it makes users to look at the value of website before they begin to click and visit the website via rich snippets in the SERPS.

2. Rich Snippets and Schema.org

To help searchers to access relevant search results, search engines employed additional rich information in the snippets. Through this marketers can get high CTRs and revenue from search engines.
Rich snippets such as reviews and pricing information allow users to quickly search for precise information. To get rich content information in snippet, search engines rely on markup on the source page while crawling.
For search engine spiders there are various formats to approach markup pages. Google supports formats such as microdata, microformats and rdf-a. Mostly all search engines including Google uses schema.org markups to provide relevant results for users.

3. Authorship

Within the search results, verified online websites will rank high when compared to sites without such online verification, which in turn users click on top (verified) results.
Search and social media factors have distributed locally and globally across multiple devices such as smart phones, videos, images etc. The content which you create must be unique and relevant based upon your channel distribution.
Authorship is more useful social signal because social signal affects website rank. Over the last few years, the social graph has been increased extensively when compared to the link graph.

Building Authorship

While building, ensure whether you’re online content is properly linked to g+ profile.
Post your content on number of important sites that are relevant to your website.
Once again check whether your authored content is properly verified or not.

4.  Author Rank

Both Authorship and Author rank techniques are different. Through authorship you can connect your website anywhere on the web. With author rank, you can potentially gain a score for your website content. Ranking scores are determined through trust and how your content is shared among web. The word Author rank mainly comes from SEO space.