How To Get Your Picture On Google
Have you ever wondered how to get your picture on Google? I’m guessing you have noticed that when you search on google more and more pictures of people are showing up next to posts? This has been a major change over the past year. When you are logged into Google you will see tiny thumbnails of yourself and other people in you network that have shared things, this is not what I am talking about here. The Google authorship tags are much larger photos that are showing up more and more, this is all linked between Google+ and your blog.
Geek alert!!! Some of this stuff is a bit technical and involves pasting some code into your site and having a Google+ profile. It is not all that difficult and for those of you that are trying to maximize your search engine exposure I think it is definitely worth the little bit of effort.
Up until a few months ago, I thought Google+ was a complete waste of time and thought it would probably go the way of Google Buzz and several other flops they have had over the years. While I still don’t think Google+ is any competition for the likes of facebook, pinterest and YouTube when it comes to the social media world, I think the simple integration of the authorship tags ensures Google+ will be around for awhile.
Get Your Picture On Google In 3 Easy Steps
1. Setup a Google+ Profile
Go To plus.google.com and either sign in with your google account or create a new one. Some people are recommending using the same email domain as your blog. I am not sure if this has an impact and these methods are working for me using my standard google gmail account.
If you haven’t setup Google+ or YouTube channels, make sure to use the same email. This will make life easier in the long run and I wish someone had told me. They are both owned by Google so if you use the same account they will be easier to link together.
Google+ is trying to compete with Facebook (unsuccessfully) so they now have personal profiles and business pages. I haven’t really seen any value for small entrepreneurs have a business page on Google+ so far, the authorship is run through your personal profile.
2. Create A Link from Google+ to Your Blog
I have read conflicting reports about this, but after testing I am pretty sure you need to link from your Google+ page to your author or bio page on your blog.
I’m not going to go into optimizing Google Plus in this post, but while you are here, make sure you put links to all your social media profiles and websites. This is google, so I imagine any backlinks from here are very valuable.
If you have a WordPress website, the author page is found under the users tab. If you don’t have a WordPress website, get one when you can. I’ll share a plugin later that will make alot of this more seamless.
3. Create A Link from Your Blog To Google Plus
You will need to do this for any page and/or post that you want the author tag to show up on. Make sure to put this bit of code in a file that you can find easily or put it on a sticky note next to your computer.
<a href=”http://www.plus.google.com/u/0/YOURID#/” rel=”author”>Google+</a>(You can put anything here, your name, etc.)
This is just a bit of HTML code that will put a link from your post to Google Plus.
I have seen this done in different ways. Either all your posts can link directly back to your google plus page or each post can link to your author page and this links back to google plus. This is the way that I do it, but I don’t think it matters. The code for that would be something like this:
By <a href=”https://www.healthcoachweekly.com/experts/” rel=”author”>Geoff Young</a>
That’s it! The following steps are to make sure it works and to make the process a little simpler for the less technically inclined.
4. Test Your Code
All these links are what Google calls rich snippets and fortunately they have put up a tool where you can see if they work. Simply take the URL of the page you have posted to and go to http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets, enter the URL and see if it comes up with an author for the page.
5. WordPress Authorship Plugin
If you are using WordPress, you can try using the AuthorSure plugin. This will place an author box at the bottom of your post and you won’t need to write any code.
Summary
With the implementation of rich snippets author tags allowing bloggers to have their picture appear in Google search results next to their content, they have ensured that at least in the “online” space, Google+ is here to stay. Follow these easy steps to get your picture on Google today!
