This is a really simple blog which just goes over the steps you need to take in order to set up your Author tag within Google.

Firstly, why is this important…

Google is giving authority to authors as well as the actual site they write on. This is something that is likely to continue to develop going forward, so it’s important to jump on the band wagon now.

It also helps your content stand out on the search results page as you can get your little face next to the listing, like so:

Authorship mark up example

See, look how cool I am.

How to set it up

You need to have an email address which has the same domain extension as the domain you are writing content for. i.e. I use luke@sleepinggiantmedia.co.uk which is fine as I primarily write content on www.sleepinggiantmedia.co.uk

This email address also has to be a Google account. Any email address can be used as a google account and you automatically get a Google+ profile as part of that. Here is the link you need to follow in order to turn your email address into a Google account, click here if you need to do this first.

All good so far.

The articles you write should have on them “written by YOURNAME” or “by YOURNAME” etc. This is really easy on wordpress as there are a million plugins that do this (as you can see below)

Login to your Google account on the email that you want to register as your Author address and then click this link to go to the Authorship registration page

Once you have filled in the details you will get an email through which looks something like this:

Google Authorship email

Then the only thing left to do is to test if it has worked! The link in the email will show you which pages you have that will potentially be picked up by Google in this format. There is also the rich snippet testing tool which you can find by clicking this link here

Happy blogging!