You may have noticed that some of your Google search results have the authors image next to the excerpt. This is known as Google Authorship. In this post I will show you how to set this up for your site.
The process is fairly simple, it’s really only 2 steps: placing a link on your website and linking your Google Plus account.
First we will add the link to our website. If you are using WordPress the Google+ Author Free plugin is very simple and works well. If you are using another CMS there are plenty of plugins available but no matter what you are using you can always hard code it.
Hard Code Method: For each page you would like your image to appear for copy and paste this link into your HTML.
<a rel=”author” href=”https://plus.google.com/106082887600614987915?rel=author” style=”display:none;”>Google+</a>
Replace the red section of the link with the URL to your own Google Plus account. To get your URL click the link: http://plus.google.com/me
Now for the Google Plus side of things. You need to add a contributor link for the website you are writing for. To add a contributor link edit the links section on your Google Plus About page. You can click here to speed up the process: http://plus.google.com/me/about/edit/co
Click on “Add custom link” and add the URL of your website. Be sure to press save.
That’s it. Pretty simple right? You can use Google’s rich snippet tool to make sure Authorship is working. http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets
Note: Google will have to index your page before your image will show up in the results so give it a couple days for it to show up.
Do you have Google Authorship on your blog? Have you noticed a change in your search traffic as a result?
