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The way Google displays search results is changing and has been changing
for the last few years, away from traditional text to incorporate author
photos and other schema information. To ride the back of that trend and
make sure your search results stand out, then rel=author is a really quick,
effective way of doing so. What this does is it adds the author photo next
to their results, and also it shows how many circles they're in on Google+.
So it can add an authority factor.
To add rel=author markup is actually really simple, and all you need to do
is follow these five steps.
The first step is to create an individual page for each author on your
site, which you probably already have as a result of WordPress or Blogger
output. If your website is only run by one person, then you can just make
an About Me page, and that will serve the same purpose. The information
that you have on this page doesn't matter too much for this purpose. You
can have, obviously, information on the author, photos of them, their
Twitter account. But the one thing that's important for this is to link to
their Google+ profile, and that's the individual profile for each author.
That link is structured like any other hyperlink. So it has and
then the link goes between the speechmarks, which in this case is the Google+ URL. Then
instead of closing the command, you then write "rel=author" in speech marks
and then you close it up. You then add it to your link as you normally
would, and then you close off the "a href" command with "" as usual.
That's all you need to do for each of those author pages.
Next you need to tell Google which author has written which blog post. You
do that by linking from each blog post to the individual author page. Again, you
should use the rel=author tag to do this, to pass that information over.
When you've done that, you're actually finished with all the things you
have to do on your website, so it's quite a simple process.
Next you need each individual author to go to their Google+ profile, edit
it, choose the 'Contributed To' section, and then change that information to
say that they write for your website. Once that's done, they can hit Save,
and then you go to the Google Rich Snippets Testing Tool. If you search for
that, then it will come up. Put in the URL of one person's blog post, and
it will actually show you how the results should look. If it looks wrong,
Google will actually say, "This part of the process is wrong. Here's how to
fix it."
Once you've done that for all of your authors, you're effectively done.
It's really just a waiting game then to see how long it will take Google to
incorporate this into their results. For us personally, when we first did
this, it was over a year ago, and it took around about three months for the
information to appear in the search engines. The last time we did it,
within 24 hours all 20 authors appeared with their information in the
search results. So they are a lot faster now, and generally the waiting
time isn't very long.
One thing to bear in mind is that the photo that each author has in Google+
is what will show in the search results. Obviously, if people have personal
Google+ profiles, it will show their personal picture. So you may need to
have a work profile if you want them to have a specific branded photo, but
that's your call and it's just something to bear in mind.
Follow these five steps and your search results will stand out a lot more.
I hope you've enjoyed this video, and for more information on what we do,
visit Koozai.com or any of the profiles below. Thank you.