What is Google Authorship?

 

Google Authorship is a way to associate posts and articles with specific authors; it helps a lot with SEO; building ‘trust’ and ‘authority’ in your site, and in yourself as an author.

If you have Authorship set up properly, it should show a small picture of yourself on the Google SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
The picture increases click-through rate significantly

How do I set up Google Authorship?
In order to set it up, you first need a Google+ account – if you’ve never heard of Google+, it’s Google’s version of FaceBook, and seems to mainly consist of digital marketing professionals

– Put a passport style photo on your Google+ profile (not like mine, which is a pic of me walking a staffie outside a dog rescue centre)
– Put a byline on every page of content you write e.g. “Written by Drew Griffiths”
– Make sure the Google+ name matches though, e.g. don’t have Daveo on a post, and David on your Google+ profile

– If you have an email associated with your website – e.g. Drew@SEOandMMA.com, then you can ‘confirm’ your authorship via an email to that account.   Check here for some more info
– You should also set up an ‘Authors’ section on your blog. Add a page about yourself, with a link to your Google+

– If however, you do a lot of guest posting, you can’t really use that option, since you won’t have an email address associated with the sites you write for.
– Instead, create a link from your articles/posts to your Google+ profile
The code for the link, should look something like this:

Make sure you have the rel=author bit at the end of your Google+ profile URL, here it is    again, just to check you’ve got it correct:

– Now that’s done, edit the “About” part of your Google+ profile, and add all the sites that you have written for (look for the small blue “Edit” text that you need to click at the bottom)

– That should do it.  You just have to wait a week or 2 before you start seeing your pic in the SERPs

– Just for fun, see if you can get this picture to appear as your official Authorship one:

Article written by Drew Griffiths