The crowd roars “Author, Author” in overwhelming response to a well written piece and the author humbly takes a bow, receiving the accolades. Despite the veil of anonymity online today, Google is crying “Author, Author”.
With so much content being generated and shared every single day, it’s hard to keep up with who the originator was. But Google wants to give credit where credit is due and has created Authorship as a feature especially for bloggers to attach credit to their content.
If you have ever seen a listing in the search results with a small thumbnail picture beside it, that’s a result of Google authorship. By tying your blog together with your Google + personal profile, you now have the opportunity to receive credit for content you create. Not only does this help protect your content from pilfering by others, but it also adds social proof of your expertise in a particular subject.
Creating Authorship is a very simple task if you are using WordPress for your blog. It requires a few simple steps.
- Create a Google + profile if you haven’t already done so. If you have a Gmail account, you already have the basis for your G+ account.
- If you are using WordPress, install the Google Authorship plugin on your site. There are several plugins you may choose. Two that I have successfully used are WP Google Authorship and Google Plus Authorship.
- From your G+ profile page, copy the URL in the address bar, through the long string of numbers (you don’t need the page name following that, just copy everything up to the last number)
- Go back to your dashboard in WordPress, under Users > All Users, select your profile and click edit. Scroll down the page and you will see the Google + box. Paste the copied URL here and save the changes.
- Lastly, add your blog address to the About section of your G+ profile under the “Contributor To” section. This completes the loop and ties the 2 together.
Google is giving increasingly more value to Authorship when it indexes websites. Sites that demonstrate high quality content will be rewarded for their contribution while stagnate sites could eventually see their rankings sink. As Google lessens the importance of link popularity in it’s search algorithm, expect authorship to fill the gap. After all, people want to deal with the leader in the industry. Google Authorship sets the leaders apart from the lazy.
Gary Wagnon is the chief Ninja Marketing Officer for 800biz Ninja Marketing Solutions and the creator of the Ninja Marketing Dojo. The Dojo teaches business owners and marketers online strategies that increase traffic to their site, improve search engine rankings and converts browsers into buyers.
