Using Google Authorship to improve your SEO

Have you Googled something and noticed that some of the search results that come up have pictures next to them? More results show images now and that is because more people are catching on to the SEO advantages of using Google Authorship. Search results with pictures stick out more and are more likely to receive clicks.

What Google Authorship does is make the author of a blog post or web article very clear by connecting the written works of the writer with that person’s Google+ profile. This can help searchers identify original writing and weed out spam pages and spin articles. It also gives searchers the ability to look at all published articles by a particular author. Using Google Authorship is beneficial to both the author and the publishing website (if they are not one and the same) because it leads to increased clicks.

Although Google does not reveal the details of their algorithm, they have made comments indicating that Authorship is one of the “social signals” that can affect where your article ranks in the search engine. If your Google+ profile receives a lot of traffic and your articles are linked to the profile, that will factor into where the article ranks in the search engine.

By now you are probably thinking, “I need Google Authorship for my articles!” You are correct! Here is how to go about setting that up:

1. Set up a Google+ personal profile.
2. Add a clear headshot as your Google+ profile photo.
3. Make sure your name appears in each article and that it matches your name on your Google+ profile.
4. Connect your Google+ profile to your content either by verifying your email address at the domain hosting the content or linking your content to Google+ with a piece of code.

Google added author clicks and impressions to Webmaster Tools so you can check to see how well an article you’ve claimed authorship of is faring in the search rankings. Using this, you can compare the traffic from articles that have Google Authorship with those that don’t to see how much of a difference there is.