It looks like the days of people hijacking your content are over, but that's just the tip of the iceberg and this really is as big as an iceberg, with much of it below what you can easily see.
Google is now implementing, "the display of author information in search results to help users discover great content."
This means that when we publish to the web and the Google spider crawls that content, Google is going to try to identify and verify who the author of that content really is. If they can, then they will display the author's thumbnail image next to the listing in search results! Here's what it looks like:
Pictures Have the Power!
Pictures are incredibly powerful. We are basically visual creatures. Trust me, SERP results that have friendly faces attached to them are going to get clicked on way more often than those that don't and that act alone (more clicks) will boost your rankings. Plus, Google has said that being able to verify authorship is a ranking factor in itself.
If you don't jump on this, you're not a marketer!
OK, so how does it actually work? Here's the basic run down straight from Google:
To identify the author of a blog or article, Google checks for a connection between the content page (such as an article), an author page, and a Google Profile. Authorship markup uses the
rel attribute (part of the open HTML5 standard) in links to indicate the relationship between a content page and an author page.You didn't get that?
Not to worry, because WordPress, as usual, makes the implementation of this fairly easy and I've got it all here for you.
The first step is to create a Google profile for your author, if you don't already have one. I'm assuming that you already have a Gmail account associated with your blog that you use for managing all your niche related email needs, right? If not, then you need to start one and use it to set up a Google profile. Log into your Gmail account and look to the top right where it shows your account name and click on that. In the menu that opens up, you'll see "Create Profile" and you click on that. Walk through the prompts and then when you get to where you can edit your profile be sure to be as interesting as you can and don't forget to add that profile picture! The more stuff you say in your profile, the better. Google likes "rich" profiles.
Here's what they say:
Here are some tips for creating a rich, useful Google Profile:
- Update your Google Profile with links to any of your other author pages around the web. (To add links to your profile, click Edit profile, then click the Links box on the right of the page and add the links you want.)
- Your profile picture must be a photograph of yourself and of high quality in order to be eligible for be shown as a thumbnail in search results.
- To easily link to your Google Profile, add the Profile button to your site.
OK, so after you've created your profile, you then add links to the content you authored. In Wordpress, you want to be sure that this link is to the canonical address for the post. That means the shortest possible URL for that specific post. In Wordpress terms, this would be the permalink.
In the case of this particular post, it is: http://deanrichards.info/easy-seo-authorship- Your profile picture must be a photograph of yourself and of high quality in order to be eligible for be shown as a thumbnail in search results.
That having been said, after reading "Crush It" I'm a firm believer in building a personal brand and I strongly advise you to do the same whenever possible.
I also would recommend that you think carefully about the picture you use. It really should be as appealing as possible. Here are Five Tips for Creating the Perfect Profile Pic. They do include tips about avatars and cartoon images, but I recommend that you stay away from those kinds of pictures. People like to see real human faces that are happy. Give that to them.
- To easily link to your Google Profile, add the Profile button to your site.
The instructions tell you to then: "Copy and paste the following code into your site where you want the button to appear"
Go ahead and copy the code, but save it for now as a text file, we're going to come back to this.
Now continue with the instructions as follows:
When Google detects content you've marked as yours, we'll list that content on the +1 tab of your Google Profile (we'll do this automatically as soon as you've +1'd at least one webpage). You'll need to create at least one +1 on your own (look for the button on search results or around the web) before we can add authored content to your +1 tab. (If you haven't +1'd anything yet, just click this button and you'll be all set:
(the internal Google +1 button from the instructions doesn't reproduce here, but go ahead and click on my +1 button at the bottom of this post and you'll be all set! lol )
You'll then be able to see this Help article on the +1 tab of your Google Profile.). Then go to your Google profile, click Edit Profile, and then select Show this tab on my profile.
Now I'm going to assume that you're like me in that you're basically the only author on your site and that you have an "About" page just like I do. If you don't have an "About" page on your site, you need to create one. It doesn't just give you a way to do this trick, it helps your site appear more trustworthy when people can see that it is owned by a real person.
Log into your site, and go to the Menus Page, which is under the Appearance tab and then look to the upper right for the "Screen Options" tab. Open that up and you'll see an option to "Show advanced menu properties" where you can check the box for "Link Relationship (XFN)"
Since the theme I'm currently using doesn't have native support for the "menus" function (it tells me this on the menus page), I created a custom menu and added the "About Me" page to that menu. If your theme has native menu support, you won't need to do this. For me, after I finish here, I will go to the Widgets page and drag the "Custom Menu" widget into my sidebar.
Now add the word "author" to the "Link Relationship" box on the About Me menu properties. Here is how my setup looks (you can click on the picture to see it full size).
Remember, for this to work, a link to your About Me page has to be on the post/page you're linking to and in Wordpress, the best way to do that is to have the About Me page in a menu that shows in a header or footer or sidebar.
That's the first part. Now you need a plugin. Here's the one: Allow REL= and HTML in Author Bios
Install the plugin and activate it and forget it. There's no setup or input from you required in any way. It works invisibly in the background. You need it because it allows the next trick.
Remember that code you copied from Google up above? Here's what you do with it...
Go to edit the About Me page and switch to the HTML tab and post the code into the page where you want your little Google Profile button to appear. But then you need to change the part where it says rel="author" to rel="me" and then save the page.
Now that you have Wordpress all set, it's time to go back to Google and add your URL to your Profile. Be sure that you add the "permalink" URL for the post/page to your profile.
The way to do that is to go into where you edit your profile and click on the "Links" area. Then select for "Add custom link" and in the window that opens up, the first box is for the name of the link and the box below it is for the actual URL.
That should be it!
You can test it all out by using Google's Rich Snippets Testing Tool
That tool has a cool little troubleshooter to let you know if you goofed up.
Have fun!
No comments:
Post a Comment