Building authority and audience with WordPress and Google Authorship

Editor's Notes

1. Coming in May 2014! Unofficial title: “Social Media for Writers.” Cover creating a central homebase on the web w/WordPress. Connecting to Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+ and several other things. Good for anyone who wants to be published (or already is)
2. A little bit confidence, a little bit arrogance
3. If people link to it, the page must be good, interesting and valuable, no?Keywords and metadata too. Site owners tell spiders what it’s about.
4. It all starts so innocently: “Hey, I love your page/blog. Here’s my page—could you link to it?”
5. If crowdsourcing by itself doesn’t work, what does?
6. Let’s look at what Google officials have been saying of late
7. Matt Cutts answers questions from webmasters on YouTube. Here’s what he said recently when asked about Authorship.
8. And here’s what the boss said in his new book. Remember how mom used to tell you that if you’re going to get your picture in the paper, let it be for a good thing. Pictures, you say?
9. Have you seen this? This is a search I did for freelance directory last week. Now I wanted to click on those results with the photos, even though they weren’t at the very top. You too, huh?
10. Oh, and look at that, he’s got a following too!
11. For the rest of the presentation, we’ll show you how to get that. It all starts at Google+
12. Not reviewing Google account setup, but once you have one, go to plus.google.com (or click +Name on black bar). They’ll ask for a profile photo. Critical to have a head shot for Authorship
13. Other piece of the profile to fill out: Site(s) you contribute to: That is, your WordPress blog/site!
14. Top of the browser. All those numbers are your unique identity. You may want to put this in a text file for easy access. But we’re done with Google+ for now. Time to go to your site!
15. Now go to your site. Here’s mine. It needs a redesign; my summer project. One thing you can say about it, though: You’ll know what my name is! What you want to learn here (on the front page) is that every post should have a byline. You can’t see this here, but mine does.
16. Whatever kind of site you build, you need to have an about page. Important for Authorship too. There’s my photo again-it’s the same one I used on G+. You don’t necessarily need to use the same one, but the straight-on hed shot is critical. Done looking at the content; off to the admin page.
17. Need a plugin. I’m told Yoast and some of the other SEO plugins are doing this now, but I’m dense sometimes. I looked for a Google Author plugin, and this one has been working for me.
18. Once installed, the Google+ Author Information plugin adds a setting in your User profile. It looks like this. Paste the G+ URL with all the numbers here. The plugin adds some code to every page on your site, called [rel=author] and adds your code. You have now set up Google Authorship. Time to test. Off to yet another site
19. TO test whether Google knows who you are now, you go to the Webmaster area of Google to the Structured Data Tools page, sometimes you’ll hear the Rich Snippets site. Type in the URL for your site, and click the big red buton. Here’s what comes up.
20. Oh goody! It worked! This is the Google+ picture, by the way. There’s some more info on this page.
21. This part tells you for sure that Authorship is working. Just below this is a way to get it working via email. You can skip over this, and look down to…
22. This section. Remember I told you about rel=author? Here is kinda what it looks like on the page. And we’re done!