Authorship is a term that Google has coined for linking the content that you publish online with your personal Google+ personal account. This is as simple as adding a link to the bottom of your page to your account. It lets Google know who created the content.
There is some debate as to weather or not authorship currently affects website rank results. According to the studies that we have reviewed authorship is not one of the direct 200 ranking indicators at this time (April 2013). That said, authorship is considered part of the social signals, which do currently impact rank.
Social signals include things like the signature on your twitter profile, or the number of likes, shares or +1s a new page gets, or how many people are talking about you on social media. For example there could be a direct correlation between the number of shares that a page gets and how high it ranks in the search engine results.
There are also strong indicators that social media including Google+ will as some point in the not too distant future become a direct indicator in how well your website is ranking. So knowing that Google and Bing are relying more heavily on social media cues and it’s only a matter of time before Google takes the importance of authorship verification to the next level it’s a good idea to get ahead of the game now. Setting up the account is easy but establishing active social accounts is not something easily done overnight and although the verification only involves setting up the account the popularity and interactions with the account are already factored into your search results as part of the social indicators.
So how do you implement Google authorship verification? If you don’t have one already you need to create a Google+ profile. This can be done by logging into your Google account and uploading a photo, filling out your profile details and verifying your email account.
Then you just need to add a link from your content to your Google profile (your personal profile, not a business profile). If you use WordPress there are free plug-ins that make this very easy. For example the WordPress SEO plug-in by Yoast adds a place for your Google+ profile information to be added right into your user contact details and then auto populates all of the pages you publish with the information. Once you have added the link you can test it by using the structured data-testing tool.
If you have additional questions about how to get your website on the front page of Google and start receiving the traffic that you’re looking for contact Brassy Marketing, a Michigan SEO company based in Traverse City and Grand Rapids MI.