Google Authorship

Back in October I talked about Google authorship for the first time. If you follow that link, you’ll see an example of what it can do for you, but for those who are new to this concept, it allows for the possibility of people actually seeing your image next to a search term if it comes up during a Google search. If someone knows you it’s even better, but if not they might visit your link just because there’s a picture next to it. It can enhance your online presence greatly… isn’t that pretty cool?

What I’m finding out is that many people aren’t sure how to do it, or haven’t done it. Goodness, I knew about it, yet I figured out yesterday that I hadn’t completed it for all of my blogs; what a moron! I’d have slapped myself if I could have gotten my hands in the right position. lol

In any case, this is a quick tutorial, and the video below, with my Hot Blog Tips Hangout buddies, will talk more about it and its importance, and you can hear me giving this same advice there if you hate reading everything.

First, you have to have a Google Plus profile; without that, none of this will work. Once you have that, or if you already have that, you come back to your blog and, if you have WordPress software as your platform, you go into your User profile. I’m betting that most of you haven’t been there since you created your blogs. You’ll see what’s below, although in a totally different color:

Notice that last category saying Google+? You copy your Google profile About page link into this space. This is what G+ will be looking for when it goes to verify that it’s you. If you have multiple writers on your blog, if you enter this for each of them and they put their profile information in it’ll show them in search results as well.

After you’ve done that, go back to your Google profile and look at your About page. It looks like this:

The email address you have here has to match the email address you have on your blog associated with that blog. If you notice, since I have 5 blogs, I have 5 email addresses. What you don’t see here is the word “verify” next to each email address, since I’ve already done that. You’d click on that word and it will send an email to that address with a link in it. You’d click on that link, then come back to your profile where you’ll see this:

That’s when you know you’re good to go. It can take anywhere from a week to 3 weeks before your image finally shows up next to your content, but the first time you see it will make you happy. And, if you didn’t go back to that other post, know that during a search your image will only come upon the first post you’re found for, even if you’re showing for all the listings. I guess even Google only wants to see us just so much. 😉

There you go; easy peasy. If you want more, watch the video below; we’re always entertaining:

http://youtu.be/lzP2zFmjL68

Last week on our Hot Blog Tips newsletter, Brian Hawkins talked a little bit about the new Google Authorship program and how, with a Google Plus account, you can how have your image show up next to your content in Google search, along with some other cool stuff. I wanted to show you what some of it look like and just how cool it really is.

First, check out the image below:

That’s what comes up on Google when someone is lucky enough (lol) to put in a search term that brings up my blog, in this case my business blog. You notice how it not only brought up the post along with my image, but it brought up more links from my site highlighting the same post in different ways. It also brought up some of the other posts that I linked to, but I didn’t want the image to go on and on. Truthfully, this is really cool, and to make sure it wasn’t a fluke because I was signed in on my Firefox browser I pulled up the same search terms on 3 other browsers on my computer and the same thing came up, with my picture, in the same order. Trust me, that’s pretty cool.

There’s the thing though. Because I have to many different blogs I wondered if it would pull up my picture for those blogs as well under my name. Below is one of the topics for this blog:

I posted the same link on Google Plus some days later and this comes up:

I’m not mad at that. But there’s one more thing that I thought was pretty cool. By having that Google Plus account, it also accessed my YouTube channel and pulled this up for one of my more recent videos:

I don’t know about you but I’m uber impressed and think this is the coolest thing. Two of my other blogs have images as well, and only my local blog won’t show the images. Why?

The only way G+ will do this is if you’ve verified the email addresses associated with those blogs. I have all the email addresses on my G+ profile except that one because I didn’t create a separate email address for it, using my personal email address that I subscribe to newsletters and the like instead. I don’t want that one out into the public so it only comes up if I have to write someone from that blog, which to date I never have. But I can live with that.

In our never ending quest to be better known, I have to say this works great for me, and the thing is that if someone just put in my name and a topic I might be associated with, it works out as well, as the example below shows what came up when I typed Mitch Mitchell Leadership, no quotation marks:

It listed a bunch more articles as well because, well, I have written lots of articles on leadership on my business blog.

Anyway, I wanted to share that with you in case you want to think about doing it for yourself. By the way, if you’re wondering why Google looks like this for me, check out an old blog post I wrote about Stylish.

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