Many people that write articles to promote their site just throw together any old author byline without giving it much thought. With the byline, a little strategy can go a long way.
Just so we are clear, the byline is the section of the article where you enter information about yourself. It is usually the last box you enter information into when uploading an article to a directory, but not always. Regardless, it is critical to promotion efforts, which means you should give it a lot of thought.
The author byline is the section where you really bring value to your article promotion efforts. The traditional reason supposedly is that people will read the article and then click the link to come to your site. This does happen, but there is a much bigger value to the byline.
As you probably know, you can add a link or two to your site in the byline section. I tend to stick to one link per article, but you can do whatever you like. Regardless, you need to give some thought to the link you are going to create. Many people just slap up a link to the home page and call it a day. While this should be your approach for a certain percentage of your articles, you can take an extra step that will really help your site.
When creating a link in the byline, give some thought to avoiding your home page. Instead, focus on linking to an internal page of your site. Often called "deep linking", this strategy serves a couple of purposes. Let's take a closer look.
Assume you have a site where you provide cooking advice and recipes. The home page is probably going to be very general, to wit, about general cooking issues. If you write a story about making pumpkin pies, anybody that clicks through to your site is going to have to hunt and peck to find the pumpkin pie page. A better approach in your byline would be to link directly to the pumpkin pie page. When someone clicks through, they will come directly to the page and your abandonment rate will fall. Abandonment refers to the number of people who come to a site, but don't take the action you want.
A second reason for using this linking strategy has to do with search engines. One search engine that starts with a "G" and ends with an "e" has started a supplemental index. If you have pages on your site that don't have links to them or get many visitors, they are often put into this index. Google claims pages in the supplemental index can still be ranked high, but this does not appear to be the case. By linking to internal pages, you can go a long way to preventing having the page added to the supplemental index. If you link to all the important pages in your site as you publish articles, you should be alright.
The linking strategy in the author byline seems like a simple subject, but it is not. Before you submit your next article, give some thought to the link you add.
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About the Author
Halstatt Pires is an SEO consultant with MarketingTitan.com.
