authorship – Nicole Munoz Consulting

Using Your Google Plus Profile you can connect a lot of the work that you do together. You can connect your Google + Business Page with your business website, you can add +1 buttons to your blog posts, and anything you write, badges to your online real-estate so that people can follow you on Google +, but did you know that you can also verify and claim everything you write by claiming authorship using your Google + profile?

It’s simple to do if you use WordPress. Go to you user account, edit profile, then scroll down until you see the Google+ information then paste your information into there. It’s really that easy. If you have multiple author names that you use, or your business hires several authors, be sure to verify with Google each of your names. If you don’t use WordPress, you can use Google + Profile under Links to add and connect your work across the web.

One Author sites is easy to do, simply past the following code into the head section of your website’s code.

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Multiple Author sites you will need to link each author’s about page to their Google + Profile by changing the code above to rel=’me’ instead of rel=’author’. This will link your authors to their Google + profiles and thus give your website a lot more authenticity. Since Google verifies businesses, this will make your trust quotient go up, thus maximizing your brand wherever you write or place content.

You can also implement the Rel=’publisher’ Google Authorship mark up too. Instead of adding the authorship tag to your site, because you have many writers who all write for your brand, you can add in the head of your site the code with the URL of your business site adding the rel=’publisher’ tag instead of the rel=’author’ tag. Note: Some sites coding requires the use of ” instead of ‘ around the word. You may need to test various forms of the code.

By claiming authorship everyone in your Google+ circles will be able to see where you blog or write. Plus, each search result will look better and stand out because your profile picture will show up next to your content on search results. That picture will draw attention to the search results over the other search results. As you build your authorship reputation your brand will be noticed more than ever before. If you get confused you can go to this page on Google to learn how to do it.

Content is your most important asset, whether you have an online business or a bricks and mortar business. Content helps you get more visitors and educate your customers and future customers. Content is the life blood of your online presence. Being able to claim authorship across the web of everything you’ve written is a great opportunity to maximize your brand beyond anything thought previously possible.

Remember that these changes will not show up instantly on your website or in search results, it might take a few days for Google to index your updates. However, the change will be well worth it.
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If you’d like to know more about Google+, then don’t miss our free Webinar on November 7th, “How To Maximize Your Business Brand On Google+”.
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One of the challenges Google has had is the ability to verify content as high quality content. Many marketers and SEO agencies spent years spinning content into hundreds and thousands of versions and posting it to multiple websites all with links back to the main website. This helped the websites achieve top rankings in Google because at that time, the algorithm based a high quality website by how many links that site had.

Google has been trying to figure out a way to provide better search results for the end user. Their search engine is their primary product and it is in their best interest to give the best results possible. They then hired a team of Search Quality Raters to manually review the search results and provide data about the results. This was a step in the right direction, but not a long term solution!

When Google launched Google+ it seemed to the world that it was an attempt to compete with the social media powerhouses of Facebook and Twitter. Maybe it was. Today Google+ is much more than that. And those that have delayed jumping in and have been slow to adapt to another social network… now is the time.

Google+ has many benefits but the one I want to talk about today is how to use it to verify authorship of your guest blog posts. Google wants to know what content you have written. They want to know what content they can safely mark as “high quality” and show in the search results.

The path to verify your guest blog posts is quite straightforward. In essence, it is a reciprocal link from your Google+ profile to your guest blog post.

The reason why you would want to verify your content is two-fold. First, Google has stated that they will give preferential treatment to content that is verified. Second, the search listings of verified content have a special bonus. They have a picture of the person who wrote the content. This little picture should increase the click through rate of your listing.

Looking at that listing, what listing are your eyes drawn to? Yep! The one with the picture. In theory, if all other things are equal, the user would click on the listing with the picture, making the click through rate of your organic search listing improve.

So how do we verify authorship of our guest blog posts and get that little picture next to our post?

Step One: Link to your Google+ profile from your guest blog post.

In your author bio you can normally put in 2-3 links to your websites. It is not yet the norm, but will be soon, for sites to request the Google+ link also. Simply put a text link with your name and link it to your Google+ profile with the ?REL=AUTHOR at the end.

Step Two: Link From Your Google+ contributor section to your guest blog post.

You can add as many websites as you need to and you can also change the visibility so they don’t all have to show up on your profile if you don’t want them to.

And that is it!

Nicole Munoz is the CEO of http://www.StartRankingNow.com. Since 2010 Nicole has helped over 150 clients market their businesses online and has spoken at over 36 live events attended by more than 41,000 people. She has recently published a series of 10 books and DVDs on Amazon called 7 Figure Marketing Blueprint. To discover more about SEO and Content Marketing, sign up for a webinar with Nicole at http://webinars.nicolemunoz.com.