Author Profiles

Everyone who writes for The South African MUST have an author profile on the website before publishing any articles.

More than this, you must also have a good digital footprint, which includes profiles or accounts on social media platforms (X, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram), Muck Rack and a Google account profile. And please remember to disseminate and share your articles via your social media accounts frequently.

Also, note that all social media accounts which appear on your author profile should be active. If dormant or non-existent, please disconnect/remove them from your author profile.

This is what your author profile should look like on WordPress, in the backend:

Please pay attention to how the respective social media fields have been populated, i.e. the link formats displayed.
This is how your profile should appear on the website, in the front:

Additionally, please link back to your author profiles in the bio of your respective social media account. See examples below

 What is an author profile?

A short description of who you are, what you write about, what your credentials are, and something interesting about you. Why should readers care what you write?

Why are author profiles important?

Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness: Google raters use this framework to assess content creators, webpages and websites as a whole.
Google wants to make sure that sites producing high-quality content are rewarded with better rankings and sites that create low-quality content get less visibility.

Expertise
These are people who possess the necessary knowledge and understanding of your field to talk deeply about a specific topic. This can be general knowledge or highly specialised.

Authoritative
Links – especially the quality of those links – continue to be a top-ranking factor. This is no secret.
For years, we’ve heard links compared to votes, where the more votes you get, the more authoritative (or popular) you are.
So where expertise is having certain knowledge or skills, authoritativeness is what happens when others (inside and outside of your industry) recognize that expertise.

Trustworthiness
You have to put in a ton of hard work to earn the trust of people and search engines.
You want people to trust in your brand or business and be willing to endorse or buy from you.
One way to increase your trustworthiness is by highlighting the credentials of your content creators and the website.
Think awards, testimonials, endorsements, and other trust factors.
People have to feel they can trust all the information they find on your website.
Likewise, Google wants to rank websites and content that it can trust.