If you haven’t heard of it, Authorship is Google’s method of tying great content producers with people looking for great content. Many of the other factors including link building can more easily be gamed by spammers and others who manipulate rankings and don’t add value to the web. It is a little tougher to fake making good content.
Why Set up Authorship
The importance of Authorship lies in the fact that you can get credit (and hence more traffic) when the content you produced is linked to your online persona. Humans are very visual people and we identify with things we see. If there are sources of content that we frequently find valuable, it’s much easier to find that content again when there is a person associated with it.
The other reason you should set up Authorship is that Google uses it as an indicator of what content to serve to people when they are searching. If users are constantly interacting with your content, and Google can see that your persona is connected to that content, it may be more likely to serve other content that you have written to those same users when they have different queries.
How To Set Up Authorship
Depending on your website setup, these steps could vary a bit. No matter what, you must first set up a Google Plus profile. You should use a recognizable headshot as your profile picture. Of course if you have different goals for the promotion of your firm, you can use an image that is aligned with those goals.
1. If you have an email on the same domain as your website, you can use that address to link your content to your G+ profile.
2. After this is linked up, make sure you have a clear byline at the bottom of your post. If you use a CMS like WordPress, Joomla or Drupal, there are plugins to help you accomplish this. If you have a custom solution, you’ll have to find another way to insert a byline.
3. Visit the Authorship page and submit your email address. Note that this only needs to happen once and not every time you publishing content.
4. Once you are done, you can actually test what your content will look like in SERPs using the structured data testing tool. Here’s what mine looks like.
If you don’t have an email that is on the same domain as your website, you can use another method that is a little more involved.
1. You’ll have to create a link to your G+ profile on your website. It should look like this: <a href=”[profile_url]?rel=author”>Anchor Text</a>. You would replace profile_url with your Google+ profile URL. The link is essentially telling Google that the content on this page is associated with this person’s profile.
2. You will then have to add a link from your G+ profile back to your website in the contributor section of the profile.
3. You can also use the structured data tool to test if this method has worked for you. If you don’t see the snippet with your image right away, give it a little time and obviously make sure that you did all the steps correctly.
Authorship gives Google a way to identify great writers who consistently produce useful content. It also gives producers a way to get themselves known as authorities in their field. For attorney’s, building a persona like this is very important. If you can get your face appearing on a consistent basis as an authority on the web, that’s good for business and for your reputation.