The Absolute Beginner’s Guide on How to Start a Succesful Blog: Setting up Google Authorship
When you google a topic, a bunch of articles and blogposts pop up, and the ones that stand out the most are the posts with the picture of the author, aren’t they?They are more prominent and somehow seem more credible, and you are drawn to them amidst the many faceless texts. A study actually showed that adding the author’s picture to the textsincreases the number of clicks increased by 150%!
This is quite an advantage for a any blog, let alone one that is just getting started. And it is really simple to add this feature to your blog with the Google authorship pligin. So take a few minutes of your time to ashow your readers the face on the other side of the screens and get more people to visit your site.
Installing Google Authorship with Jetpack
In our last instance of the Tutorial, we mentioned some really cool plugins you might want to use, and Jetpack was one of them. Thanks to some new features, Jetpack now provides one of the easiest ways to add the Google authorship feature to your WordPress posts. Jetpack actually creates an official connection between your posts and your profile, without you having to add another plugin. All you need to do is activate the Google+ Profile connection in Jetpack and this plugin will do the all the work for you.
Authorship Plugins
There are numerous authorship plugins you can use to add Google Authorship functionality to your blog. Each plugin has its own setup instructions, but they are fairly simple and you should get the plugin working in no time at all. Here are several of them:
AuthorSure: This plugin enables some advanced Google authorship functionalities, Works on single and multiple author sites and it supports several ways to link your posts/pages to your author pages: byline, footnote, author box or menu link. It also creates links from your site’s author pages to the authors’ Google Plus Profiles on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube and Skype as well as Google+ and it allows you to control whether your rich snippets show the original post publication date or the last time the post was updated.
Google Author Link: This is a much more basic plugin that allows you to link your content to your Google+ profile page. It works both for single user WordPress sites and multi-author sites. Each user has a new field to store their Google Profile URL, then on each page and post the plugin will create the required link in the HTML Head.
Google+ Author Information in Search Results: This plugin helps you integreate a special link into your posts and pages so that Google can match your content with your Google+ Profile. Once this is done your profile picture will appear in Googles search results.
Any way you do it, it is unlikely to take more than half an hour of your time, and it will most definitely pay off, so give it a go!
