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Digital Persona Hub

A digital persona hub is a central place for all key details about a digital persona.

The digital persona hub is a web page with authoritative information about the persona. The hub page can also link to more detailed pages on the same website.

Ideally, a digital persona hub is controlled by the person it describes. In many cases it is a separate website, only describing the person and related entities.

Sometimes the digital persona hub is called an entity home.

Four types of information to include in a Digital Persona Hub

A digital persona hub must include:

  1. All relevant simple facts
  2. All relevant relations to other digital personas [1] or entities [2]
  3. Photos representing the persona
  4. Links to other profiles representing the same person or brand

1. Simple facts

Simple facts [3] can be the name of the person or her birthdate. This type of information is called a property [4] of the entity.

Related entities can be the place of work, organization employed with, or a book the person authored. This type of information is called a relation [^relation] between entities.

All relations should be HTML links to an authoritative page about the related "thing".

3. Photos representing the persona

Modern search engines are multi-modal. They provide access to text documents as well as images and videos.

A digital persona hub should provide photos of the persona as well as videos and other images related to the persona.

Links to other pages should include all profiles that describe the same person or brand.

For social profiles a link with the icon of the social platform and the name of the platform as alt text is sufficient.

For author profiles, it is beneficial to write some context for the existance of that relationship.

All profile pages should link back to the digital persona hub page.

For profiles where more than one link is allowed, one can link to other social profiles as well.

Structured Data on the Digital Persona Hub

Structured data [5] strengthens the digital persona hub. Search engine crawlers like to see the information in a machine readable way.

Structured data also provides clues as to what properties and relations are stored by search engines in their knowledge graphs [6]. Such properties should be considered for describing the persona

Structured data also allows to specify realted entities [2:1] more clearly, by using the sameAs property.

All basic facts in structured data should also be provided to the reader in HTML. All related entities in the structured data should be linked to in the HTML. An exception to this rule is to provide more detailed descriptions of related entities, such as their name, url and sameAs properties.

The Role of Digital Persona Hubs in DPO

Building a digital persona hub is the most important project for digital persona optimization [7]. The hub forms the central place of authoritative information. It helps a search engines to connect information from around the internet to about the same persona.

The links outward from the hub page allow the search engine to find all other profiles. The backlinks confirm to the search engine that they describe the same persona.

The more consistent the information is between the hub page and the other profiles, the stronger is the search engine's believe in the facts [3:1] represented.

Footnotes

  1. A digital persona is the aspect of a personal brand that is shaped by the person's online presence, behavior, and interactions on the internet. ↩︎

  2. An entity is a "thing" that is well-defined and has an identity. For example, a person, a location, a concept, or an event can be entities in a knowledge graph. ↩︎ ↩︎

  3. A fact is a thing that is known or proved to be true. In knowledge graphs where information is entered automatically, it is better to assume the information is likely to be true or has been classified as true. ↩︎ ↩︎

  4. A property is a specific attribute of an entity. A property describes an entity by its value ↩︎

  5. Structured data is a standardized format for providing information about a webpage and classifying the page content. ↩︎

  6. A knowledge graph is a graph that expresses knowledge in its simplest form. ↩︎

  7. Digital Persona Optimization (DPO) is the process of strategically managing and enhancing a digital persona’s online presence to improve visibility, credibility, and search engine rankings. ↩︎