Claiming Google Authorship as part of your online audiology marketing strategy

By Geoffrey Cooling

Google has actually made the system of claiming your authorship easier than it originally was. Initially it was quite a technical exercise with adding mark-up to webpage headers etc. Although you can still go down this route, there are easier ways. Initially you need a Google+ profile, if you have a gmail account it is as simple as setting up a Google+ profile from there. If not, you will need to first get a gmail account and then set up your Google+ account.

Your Google+ account is the anchor of authorship, it is the profile that becomes your author profile. I feel that claiming your authorship and using it will be a central part of your online audiology marketing strategy into the future. But how do you do it?

If you have an e-mail address on the same domain as your blog, it is as simple as going to this page https://plus.google.com/authorship and signing up. It will take you through a few steps verifying the e-mail address and then it will be as simple as ensuring you have a byline on all your content. However, in order to have your content on any other website you will need to add that site to your profile in the contributor to section. You will then need to add a html markup to your content, or indeed ask the webmaster or controller of the site to add it for you. My personal markup is By https://plus.google.com/100410169393907495854?rel=author””>Geoffrey Cooling</a> . You can see it just under the lead header on this page, it just shows as By Geoffrey Cooling. Thinking of changing it to The Fat Lad, probably suits my sense of humour better.

Your mark up would be similar with the number after google.com being your profile number and obviously the name would be different, I claim the fat lad.Both ways are detailed at

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1408986&expand=option2

Below is a clear explanation of the process.

Option 2: Set up authorship by linking your content to your Google+ profile

If you follow the contributor route, it is important that the markup is placed on each page, just remember to include it as your byline on each post. There are also various plugins that will automate the process for differing content management systems like Drupal, WordPress or Joomla. They will only work on self-hosted blogs, if you are blogging on blogger, it is as simple as connecting your blog to your Google+ profile in your settings. On WordPress.com, I think you can add your Google+ profile in your settings, but to be safe I would also add the markup.

Adding the markup needs to be done in the text section of your editor not in the plain view, usually what I do is write and format the post in plain view. Then I switch to text view and insert the markup befor I publish. I keep the markup along with other handy pieces of code on a notepad document I have saved to my desktop. Notepad is on every microsoft computer, it is a simple plain text editor. If anyone needs further assistance with this or is having issues with setting it up, give me a shout.

The only thing is for me to help or set it up for you, you will have to give me temporary access to your Google+ profile. Not always a comfortable thing to do.

Regards

Geoff 

 WebStory: A super blog editor for bloggers

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