When you do great work, sometimes it’s nice to have your face associated with it. Now, when it comes to writing great blog posts, it’s easy to claim it as your own for the world to see.
When searching for something in Google recently, have you noticed the tiny headshot next to the results? That means that the author of that blog has set up Google Authorship, tying their Google+ account to their blog and letting the world know, “I wrote this content!”
And, according to the Media Shift blog, some blogs have seen a 15-50% increase in traffic based on their photo showing up in search.
The benefits of Google Authorship are:
- Improved Search Engine Results Page (SERP) rankings
- Recognition for specific members of your team, rather than just the company as a whole
- Not totally known – Google puts more and more emphasis on Google+ features as time goes on, and we can’t be completely sure of their plans for Authorship
The process of setting up Google Authorship, in theory, is pretty simple.
For Imagebox clients, this is the process they go through in order to get everything set up. You need to have a link to your blog from your Google+ page and a link to your Google+ page from your blog. Don’t have a Google+ account? Actually, if you have a Gmail address, you do!
If you are an Imagebox client, here is what you need to do in order to get set up:
To log in to Google Plus is to log in to your gmail account. Log in to Gmail and click “YourName+” in the top left corner. Then, follow these steps:
- Go to your Google+ page.
- Click “profile” on the left hand side.
- Copy the URL of this page and send it to us via Basecamp. We will do everything within WordPress needed to complete Authorship (but we may need the name and emails of each blog author.)
- Go to this link, type in your email and click “Signup for Authorship”:
- Go to your Google+ profile hover over your photo and click “change profile photo.” Pick the image you would like to show up in search!