How to implement Google Authorship markup easily with Yoast

Google Authorship Markup – author’s photograph with his/her Google Plus profile page link in search result of Google is very useful for bloggers as well as the blog readers . The visitors from search engines can directly identify the author of a specific article / blog without actually visiting the blog. Moreover, it creates better impression for visitors and search engines. Many of the bloggers, after implementation of such mark-up have experienced a traffic boost of 25-30 % , from Google Search Engine. There are various tutorials as well as plugins available over the web to set up the authorship. However,  in the recent update of Yoast –  WordPress SEO Plugin , they have included the authorship feature. With this feature , this markup can be implemented within seconds. This plugin works for both Single Author Blogs , and Multi – author blog. Here is the step – by – step guide  on How to implement authorship markup with Yoast.

#1 Update to the latest version of WordPress SEO By Yoast Plugin

This process is pretty easy. You just have to update this plugin from the Plugins or Updates section , right from the dashboard of your WordPress Blog. After successfully updating to the latest version , implement the following steps .

• Also Read : Why you should Update Yoast

#2 Add Your Google Plus Profile Link in your Blog profile

You can do this very easily by editing your profile via Dashboard >> Users >> Your Profile. On this page, there will be a field named Google+ , under Contact info, as shown below. If you do not have Google Plus Profile yet, you can make it by going to official link of Google Plus.

Your Google Plus Profile Link should look like : http://plus.google.com/xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (the part with x’s shows the profile ID – For presentation purpose only . The number of ‘x’ and the number of characters in your profile ID may not be the same.)

#3 Add link of your Blog Author Page in ‘Contributor To’ Section in Your Google Plus Profile

The link of Author page for WordPress blogs is like : http://blogname.com/author/username . Find such author link and paste it to your Google Plus Profile page.

In G+ Profile page, click on ‘Edit Profile’ . You will be shown different fields / options like Places, Education , Contributor to , etc. Go to the ‘Contributor To’ section. Add your Blog name as Label and the link of your blog’s author page as URL (Uniform Resource Locator) . after adding these details, save the profile.

#4 For Single author blogs

Now that you have successfully set up the G+ profile with a link to your blog in ‘Contributor To’ section , it’s the time to set up the author for your home page.

To set up the authorship markup for home page, go to SEO >> Titles and Meta >> Home. Under this ‘Home’ tab, you’ll find a field for author highlighting under Author metadata section. Under this field , set your name for author highlighting , and save the settings.

To check the whether the markup has been set up correctly or not, go to step-6 below.

#5 For Multi Author Blogs

For multi-author blogs, perform step 2 and step 3 for each of the author. This will show markup of respective author on their article links. However, for the home page , no author will be shown. To show authorship of a specific author , go through the process shown below.

Go to SEO >> Titles and Meta >> Home. Under this ‘Home’ tab, you’ll find a field for author highlighting under Author metadata section. Under this field , you will find all of the authors of your blog. Select the appropriate name of Homepage Author for author highlighting and save the settings.

#6 How to check whether Google Authorship markup has been setup correctly or not

After performing above steps correctly, you’ll need to check that the markup is correctly setup. To check , go to this link and enter URL of your Blog’s home page or any of the article. In most of the cases, no errors occur. However, even if there is an error, you can fix it very easily, as most of the possible solutions are given on that page. However, if you are still unable to solve the issue, you may comment below, and I’ll try my best to solve that error.

Thus, with a simple 5 – step process, you can easily set up authorship markup without doing anything with those rel=’me’ and rel=’author’ tags.

For some advanced users : These rel tags are used with <link> and hence, one can not see on the page itself. However, you can easily see the codes from the source of the page.