In an earlier post, I detailed what Google Authorship is and why, as a marketer, you’d want to have it configured for your online persona. In this post, we will go one step further and detail exactly how to setup Google Authorship. To setup Google Authorship, you’ll need the following:
- Blog
- Google+ Profile
- Domain Verified with Google by Using Google Apps, Google Analytics, or Google Webmaster Tools.
If you’ve got all four of those things, congratulations! You can start using Google Authorship. Until recently, users who wished to gain Google Authorship had to tweaks some URLs and play with the rel=author tag in their hrefs. Now, Google has added a nifty “Google+ Badge” feature that will automatically add in the tracking/verification code for you.
To get started, simply log in to your Google Account and visit the Google+ Badge Tool. Then, simply fill out the information accordingly by pasting in your Google+ Profile URL and configuring the options you wish to have design-wise.
Once you’ve tweaked the design to your liking, look to the right of the page to locate the outputted code for your snippit. Select the code and copy it to your clipboard. After you copy the code to your clipboard, the rest is pretty simple. All you have to do is paste the code where you’d like the badge to show. In this example, I will be pasting it into a Text Widget using WordPress. All I have to do is create a new Text Widget, or add to an existing widget, and paste in all of the code provided by Google as shown below.
Now that I have my code pasted into my text widget, I’ll save the widget and take a look at my sidebar to see if it’s rendered properly.
There we have it! If you see your button rendering, you’ll soon find yourself with Google Authorship. Please note it can take a few weeks before Google starts to index your site with Google Authorship. Be sure to head over to your Google+ profile while you are waiting to fine tune your profile picture and public information!
