Adding Google Authorship To Your WordPress Site

Facial recognition is a powerful marketing tool and authors, business owners, and bloggers alike are taking advantage of it. When searching Google, you have more than likely noticed that photos are now appearing next to some of the listed search results on the search engine results pages — and you may have even been influenced by those photos when deciding which link to click.

Getting YOUR Photo to Show Up

Adding your photo to Google’s search results can easily be accomplished in a few different ways with a WordPress site. In fact, the process is nearly identical using three of our favorite WordPress tools:

• A Custom WordPress Theme running on Genesis
• A Genesis WordPress theme
• The WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast

STEP 1:

Setup a Google Plus (Google+) account, fill out the profile completely, upload your photo, and join a few communities, circles, etc. Heck, you can even circle Me, Jennifer, and Bourn Creative while you’re there.

STEP 2:

Copy your profile link URL (from the browser window URL bar). Login to your WordPress site and view your User profile. Both Genesis based WordPress themes and the WordPress SEO plugin add a field under User Contact Info to paste/add your Google+ link.

STEP 3:

For Genesis sites, open the Genesis SEO settings and select which user profile you want the home page of the site assigned to.

• For a single author site, it should be your profile
• If you have a multi-author site like ours, you will need to decide who is the best person to have the site assigned to

For sites running the WordPress SEO plugin, head to the Titles & Metas settings page, then open the Home tab and select the user you want for your homepage. Unlike Genesis, with WordPress SEO you can also set a Google Publisher Page if you have a separate Google+ account for your business.

STEP 4:

Connect your Google+ profile to your WordPress site. On your Google+ profile page, click on “About”, and near the bottom you will find a “Links” section where you can add a link to every site you have Google Authorship setup on.

SOME THINGS TO NOTE:

Getting your photo to show up in Google’s search results isn’t guaranteed after you implement these steps, but there are a few ways to test and see if you did everything correctly.

The first thing to check is to make sure your WordPress site is outputting the correct hidden HTML that Google needs. To check this you can view the source code of your website using any browser, and look for a line of code that looks like the sample below; but with your Google+ link.

Once you confirm that your site is outputting the right HTML, you can check your Google Plus connection by using Google’s Rich Snippets testing tool and test against any page on your site.

If your test at the rich snippets testing tool work correctly, it should just be a matter of time before your photo begins to appear in Google’s search results and your website click-throughs from Google’s search engine results pages increase from the power of facial recognition.