“By Larry Neilson”
By now, some of you are asking yourselves, what is authorship? Great question. For this purpose we are going to define the word in a very broad sense as the person who originates content. Content related to authorship is relegated blog posts. This post is a continuation of the last two posts related to content marketing. 
Why worry about content marketing? If you want to get found, you need to write content. Period. To review, Google crawls your website and your blog posts electronically in order to determine your rank, reputation and authority. The main purpose of content marketing is to build valuable links back to the webpage you are promoting by offering something of value that is relative to your business/site so that it is widely shared. The more content, the more links. Links are like votes. The more votes, the greater the perceived authority and the higher your site will rank for the search term being promoted by the content.
1. Protects you as the author of the original content.
Authorship is staking a claim to the content. Content is borrowed/stolen all the time. People repost content and share content, or republish it in their own name. The search engines will eventually crawl the content, and have no way of telling which version was created first or who the real author is.
Google Authorship. Simple code rel=author will tie your post to your Google profile and the content is forever marked as yours. By connecting the two your name and picture appear next to the post (author rich snippet search results) thereby verifying you as the original author and protecting the content as your original content. Remember, its the original content that counts. Duplicate content has no SEO value.
2. Improve Ranking
Claiming content will improve clicks and increase traffic, but it will also build Author rank with Google. Author Rank is how Google measures “rank, reputation and authority. While there is no direct correlation between Author rank and improved rankings, there is proof that Author rank is included in social signals absolutely does improve rankings.
Google has repeatedly said the Authorship will be a key ranking factor at some point in the future. Like most things internet, this is a log-term strategy in which trust is based on content quality, shares, and your association with people who are influential in your area of expertise.
3. Higher Clicks and More Traffic
Adding Google Authorship to your content ads a “rich snippet” to search results and “rich snippets” increase clicks. Rich snippets apply to reviews, people, products, businesses and organizations, recipes, events and music. To get your authorship information to appear you need to create a Google+ Profile, with a picture, and connect the content to your profile.
If you haven’t done so already click on the Google Authorship link above and get started, or call one of our insurance content marketing specialist and we’d be happy to help you.