How to Write an Author Bio? Useful Tips and Examples
Not every article found online includes information about its author. As a reader, you probably want to make sure that the content you access was created by a specialist in this field. As portal owners keep this in mind, they started introducing author bios. What are they? What should they include and why is it worth placing them on your website? Keep reading to find out and get inspired with some tips for creating author’s bio.
Table of contents:
- An author bio – what is it?
- How to write an author bio – 9 tips to do it right
- How to write an author bio? The takeaway
An author bio – what is it?
Every piece of content found online has been created by someone. However, we can’t always access information about the author. Nevertheless, if entries have been assigned to specific authors you can read their bios.
An author bio is a note about the specialist who prepared the text – it usually consists of a photo, name (often also surname), position held, as well as information about professional experience and interests.
Why did people start implementing author bios in the first place?
Well, author bios became more common after the August 2018 update, which was called the “Medical update” (mostly because it affected websites from the medical sector). At the time, there were all kinds of theories regarding the reason for such big changes, and one of them was presented by Lily Ray, Senior SEO Specialist at Amsive Digital. She showed that a big part of this and subsequent updates were caused by the E-A-T principle, which has been having an important impact on page visibility in Google.
What is it?
E-A-T stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. It means, among other things, that the content created on the website should be prepared by professionals, and the website should inspire trust in the users.
However, it’s worth noting that SEO specialists have differing opinions on whether E-A-T actually affects website visibility. This is caused mainly by the fact that it’s hard to estimate whether this factor is taken into account by Google when determining a site’s position.
Yet, the fact that Google mentions the word E-A-T 137 times in its search quality guidelines already suggests that this factor is important. The data presented by the aforementioned Lily Ray shows, among other things, that:
- Sites that gained on Medical Update included 34% more content from medical reviewers than other sites.
- Websites with greater visibility are 258% more likely to use content prepared by experts.
- Those that have benefited from the update provide external links to data sources 24% more often.
- Sites that have increased visibility are 94% more likely to enable user comments.
These results are based on analyzing the changes in visibility of 64 sites that gained or lost after the mentioned update. These are not all the findings, but selected ones related to the topic discussed today.
On the one hand, Google recommends in its guidelines that author data should be given on websites, but on the other hand, John Mueller – Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google – confirmed that Google doesn’t evaluate websites based on the reputation of their creators, which was emphasized during the hangout meeting:
So, is it worth taking your time to create author bios? Of course! Let’s find out why!
Why should you create author bios?
- Adding a new recommended value (namely author.url) to structured data – it makes it easier to unambiguously determine the correct author of an article. It’s not a coincidence that this suggestion is here.
- Improving user experience – an internet user notices an article and sees who the author is. Users may be familiar with the author, they may have read their book or seen social media posts. This makes users more interested in the content and encourages them to read the text. Reliability of the entry is another issue. Let’s assume that an Internet user reads two different texts on the same topic, but sees conflicting conclusions in them. People are more likely to believe in information found in an article with an author bio. After all, nobody likes anonymous opinions. Users may remember the page with bios and consider it trustworthy. As a result, they’ll come back to it in the future.
- Positioning yourself as an expert – thanks to an author bio, you can position yourself as an expert content creator. In the future, your publications may positively influence the image of the site on which they’re published. Thus, if you publish texts created by a famous author, it’ll have a positive impact on your reputation. Expert entries are appreciated by website owners.
- Increasing user engagement – users who see content prepared by specialists may want to ask questions in the comment section. This, in turn, encourages users to visit your site again and helps to increase the amount of user generated content (check out: User generated content – what is it and how to use it to your benefit?). If people leave comments, they probably want to receive an answer. If you reply in a professional way, you’ll probably be valued by the readers.
- Dividing the website content according to the authors – it’s another tribute to the users. If users like one of the content creators on the site, they may want to read the remaining entries prepared by this person.
How to write an author bio – 9 tips to do it right
It’s worth spending some time preparing your author bio so that this element on your site looks professional and can actually help you achieve the goals you expect. It’s beneficial to become familiar with top-quality examples. Here are sometips for creating author’s bio that will do the work.
1. Don’t make it too long
Be specific, don’t write too much – include the most important information that may be of interest to the recipient. You don’t have to describe your whole life – write about your work experience, position and interests. That is definitely enough. The bio isn’t supposed to be a long text. Its length is usually 50-100 words and this is the optimal choice.
2. Don’t forget to mention the area of expertise
It’s an extremely important element. If you write an article on a particular subject, the recipient should be able to find out whether you’re an expert in the field. As mentioned above, this may be one of the decisive factors, especially if people have a lot of options to choose from. An author bio is a good place to write about your experience in various positions, boasting about your degrees, speeches, or conferences where you were a speaker. It’s a must-have in numerous industries.
For example, an Internet user who is looking for health-related advice expects the author to be someone with knowledge of the subject. After all, listening to suggestions of a person that isn’t experienced in the field may cause health problems.
3. Include links to your social media profiles
It’s another factor that makes you more reliable as an author. If an internet user clicks on these links, they’ll see that they’re dealing with a real person who can be followed on various platforms and isn’t a fictional character.
4. Provide a photo
Your photo is another element that will instill confidence in the content shared on the site. Thanks to it, readers will realize that there is a real person who wrote the article.
Don’t take photos from stocks – many readers will notice this, and may even find other pages on Google that use the same photographs for completely different purposes.
5. Include a CTA
An author bio is a good place to call a reader to action. In this case, you may encourage users to read your other articles or follow you on social media.
6. Accentuate your style
An author bio doesn’t have to be boring, schematic and written in the simplest language. In many industries, users expect to find bios with quality content, wordplay and memorable information.
7. Take care of separate URLs for each bio
Each bio should have its separate URL as this way you can easily optimize the content for a particular author’s name and such a subpage may generate traffic on its own. Internet users may search for articles by a given author.
Remember to add a subpage with the authors’ index.
8. Let the search engine index author bios
You shouldn’t block the possibility of indexing the content, because such a subpage is part of internal linking. You can link to other articles written by the author, moreover, you probably want your bios to generate organic traffic.
9. Provide a link to author bios on each subpage
By doing so, you’ll improve the sub-linking of that directory. It’ll become an element of internal linking that can positively affect the visibility of individual author bios in Google.
How to write an expert author bio? The takeaway
We hope that after reading this post you already know how to write an author bio. Remember to make it specific, emphasize your expertise, knowledge, experience but also show that you’re also a human. Add a photo and links to your social media profiles.
Provide descriptions of individual authors in separate URLs and let Google index them. By doing so, you can benefit from building your image as an expert, increasing your site’s visibility in Google, and generating more traffic to your site. Let us know if those tips for creating author’s bio were helpful!
I came across your website when searching for an author bio example. This is a great compilation. Thank you a lot.