Trust.
Why should anyone trust what they are reading? What if it holds mistakes and gaps instead of facts? Who wrote this, and what do they actually know about the subject?
This article points at a simple problem: it is time we knew who the “author” behind our articles is.
Two things are worth looking at.
- Craft
- Expertise
The craft of writing
Producing something worth reading, writing it so that it flows, and yes, having a voice of your own. Being a good writer is a craft in itself. But on its own, in 2024, that craft is worth less than you might think, because writing is a craft and it has to be joined to expertise.
Expertise in a field
To succeed as a writer today you have to know one field properly. That holds even if what you write is a novel. It is what it takes to produce something accurate and genuinely informative.
The formula: the craft of writing + expertise in a field = content that works
Author box plugins and SEO
Our good friend Benjamin Rojas (President of All in One SEO) drew my attention to something about Türk SEM.
“Why is there no author box on Turksem.com?“
I use an author box on nearly every site I run, and I have written about what it does for SEO on several of my other publications. Somehow I kept overlooking its absence here. We did have an author box plugin on Türk SEM, of course. In time it stopped being updated and started producing errors, so we disabled it and waited for a new version. Years went by in that waiting, apparently. As you can see at the foot of this article, we have now installed an author box plugin and switched the author details back on.
So here is a short list drawn from my own experience with author boxes. The plugins below all deliver the SEO benefit that comes with telling readers who wrote the piece.
The 3 best author box plugins
Simple Author Box
This is exactly the plugin I put on Türk SEM in January 2024.
We chose it because it is plain and it works. The basics and the social media links cover everything we needed.
PublishPress Authors
One of the author plugins I use most across my sites. We reach for it in particular on multi author work, because it lets us build a proper author page. If your site has several authors, this one gives you an authors page as well.
Its SEO settings are rather good, and they will raise how credible and trustworthy your site looks.
Starbox
Among author box plugins, Starbox is one of the strongest on SEO. Its rich content settings in particular are as accurate as you could ask.
Being able to display the box at the top of an article is one of its real advantages.
A closing note
Using an author plugin on your articles is not only for SEO: it is reassuring to the people reading the piece. At Türk SEM, on our clients' blogs above all, we want any piece of content to show which author wrote it.
That way people know the article they are reading was written by someone who has done the work. It is one more reason to trust it. In our recent piece on optimizing older content we pointed at something worth repeating here: according to HubSpot's research across 13,500 blogs, the companies publishing more blog content made more sales. Which makes this exactly the moment to treat blogging as a professional job.
