A couple weeks ago I was Googling
something and noticed that a handful of search results on each page had a small
profile image next to the listing.
You’ll notice that there’s an image
of me, along with the number of people who have circled me and a link to more content by me.
When I saw the images on that search
page, I thought “wow, that’s pretty cool and I bet it helps increase click
through rates.”
So I did what all intelligent people
do when they don’t know how to do something.
Phone a friend.
In my case, I emailed a buddy who
happens to be one of the top SEO people on the planet and asked him how it’s
done.
Who I asked isn’t important, but how
it’s done is… so here are the steps I took to get Google to display my profile
in their search results.
1.
Create an Author Page
This was an easy step for me,
because like most people, I have an About page.
Typically most bloggers have a page on their site where they include
biographical information and things of interest to them.
In addition to that, a lot of folks
have links to their social media profiles so they can increase their follower
count on those platforms.
On my About page, I included a link
to my Google+ account, which has a rel=”me” attribute on it. Here’s the
code that I used for this link:
<a
href="https://plus.google.com/u/0/109450535379570250650/posts"
rel="me">Google+</a>
2.
Setup a Google+ Profile
In case you don’t have one, you’ll
need to create a Google+ profile. Once you have an account setup,
you’ll need to edit your profile to add a link in the Contributor to
section that points to your Author page.
Here’s a screenshot which shows the
contributor to settings:
I have a link called My Blog
and that points to my About page
where my Google+ link (with rel=”me” attribute) exists.
3.
Link to your Author Page
The Author (or About in my case)
page needs to be linked to with a rel=”author” attribute added to it, in
order to “prove authority” of the content on the site.
Since I used WordPress custom menus
to build my site navigation, adding this attribute was quite simple.
Go to your custom menus screen, and
make sure the Link Relationship (XFN) option is checked in the Screen
Options section. (There’s a gray tab labeled “Screen Options” in the upper hand
corner of your screen when you’re in the dashboard.)
When you add/edit a custom menu
link, there’s a Link Relationship (XFN) input box where you’ll need to place author
in.
Here’s how the custom menu link for
my About page looks:
4.
Be Patient and Confirm You’ve Done it Correctly
It will usually take a few days (sometimes
longer depending on the site) for Google to re-index your Author page, as well
as hit your Google+ profile page.
After some time has passed, you can
use the Rich Snippets Testing Tool from Google to see if things are
working properly.
If they are setup properly, you’ll
be able to submit a sample page to the tool, and you’ll see a report that looks something like this:
Alternative
Methods
It’s worth noting that the steps
mentioned above were the ones that I took to get Google to display my profile
in search results.
Of course there might be other methods
that can get this to occur, so this is not the only way to get this to happen.
Do some Googling on this if you want.
In fact, just the other day Joost de
Valk published a blog post that appears to be a much simpler
way to accomplish this.
Either way will work, so choose the
method you feel most comfortable using.
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