What is Google Authorship and What does it do?
The act of Optimization is a huge part of marketing your business online. Tools like Google Authorship help you to optimize your online presence as a whole, helping content from you website or that you were a part of creating show up more often and in higher ranked spots when someone types your name or your company’s name into Google.
Authorship is another part of Google’s Rich Snippets; the different things that show up alongside a Google search result. Despite it’s name, Google Authorship is not just for writers and authors, it’s for anyone who owns a website or contributes related content to another one. It’s helpful to anyone who is trying to get their name out their name out there and help their content be seen by more people.
How Does it Work?
Google authorship is pretty simple. The first thing you have to have is a Google Plus account. These are pretty easy to get and set up. As long as you have a google email (a gmail account) you have access to a Google Plus. Google Plus is basically Google’s take on social media. The cool thing about these accounts, though, is how they can be used in professional environments to help better your online presence and marketing efforts.
Here are a few tips for ensuring your Google Plus account will work with features like authorship:
- Fill out as much of your profile as you can
- Make sure you’re connected with a few people
- Make sure your profile picture is a picture of you and is a good quality head shot
- Make sure you use your real, full name when creating your Google Plus account
Once your Google Plus is active, putting Google Authorship onto your content is fast and easy. First you need to add a rel=author code into the html or css of your website, blog, or in the source code of the posts or articles. You can find the exact code you need here. Once you’re done with that you have to add the link for that website, blog, or article to your Google Plus under the ‘Links’ portion of your profile. The link above will give you full instructions on how to do all of this.
Once you’ve done all of this, you want to double check to make sure you’ve done everything correctly and that authorship is, in fact, working. You can do this by using Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool. Once authorship is confirmed as working it will take a few days to a week for your authorship information to start showing up in search results.
Having Google Authorship on all content you have online will help get your name out there, help drive traffic to your website, and help your overall internet presence. This is a huge factor in continuing to maintain a good marketing strategy and helping your company grow by utilizing simple digital marketing tactics and other tools available to you in the digital world.
If you’d like to learn more about Google Authorship and how it can help you, contact us for more information.
