This is a Guest Post by Yeremi Akpan. His blog, Pro Blogger Tips, helps bloggers rapidly build an audience for their blogs.


When I first saw pictures in Google search result, it was only the fact that I was in a private lounge that stopped me from shouting out: "How did they do that?"

Then after a moment, it occurred to me that the search results with Rich Author Snippets were much prettier than the plain old ordinary result.

















Apart from the aesthetic appeal of seeing your face in the search results (and more seriously, the branding potentials), is there any other benefit you can derive from implementing Rich Author Snippet?

A little digging showed me studies that proved that implementing rich author snippets can boost both your traffic and CTR.


























Catalyst increased their CTR and traffic by more than 150% with just ten minutes of work. (Refer to image above)

Now that’s what I call a sexy ROI!

I rushed over some research of my own and came up with equally startling results.

I asked 15 volunteers (randomly selected) to search for the keyword on page seo on Google.

Despite the fact that SeoMoz was number three in the results page, my volunteers clicked on that site three times more often than they clicked on the site on the #1 position.

Why do you think they did that?

Smart one, you got the answer right!

SeoMoz was the only one on the page that had implemented rich author snippets.

There and then, I decided to find out how others managed to get their pretty faces up there and how I could put mine right next to theirs.

It was not easy at first.

These excellent blog posts by Andy Crestodina and A J Khon pointed me in the right direction.

After a series of trial and errors, I have finally cracked it and in this post I document the exact steps I took to get my picture close to the stars.

Prerequisites:

1. Google+ Profile updated with a recognizable headshot as your profile photo.
2. An email on the same domain as your blog content (optional)
3. Access to Wordpress (or any other CMS) profile dashboard (optional)

Let’s begin…

Option 1: Claim Your Blog Posts With a Domain Email

This can be completed in three easy steps.

Step 1: Go to Google’s authorship page and signup for the authorship program. Use an email address on the same domain as your content to signup here.

That shows Google you are associated with the content and that you are ready to lay claim to it publicly.





















Step 2: You will be sent a verification email. Click the link in the email to verify your email address.

When you verify your email address, Google automatically adds the email to your work section of your Google+ profile.

To confirm that your email address has been verified, sign into your Google+ account and check for the email in your work section.

Verified emails have a grey check mark by their side.












After email verification, the domain associated with the email will be added to the "Contributor to" section of your Google+ profile.

Step 3: Link your posts to your Google+ profile.

I know. “I thought this was email verification?” (Ask Google)☺.

From the information Google provided, it would seem that these two steps are supposed to be sufficient for the Rich Author Snippet setup, but when I ran a test post through the Rich Snippets Testing Page, I kept getting the error below:

Error: Author profile page does not have an authorship link to a Google Profile.

That made this step 3 necessary for me.

A good way of implementing this is through your profile page.

In Wordpress admin dashboard, go to your profile and locate the “Biographical Info” content box.












Using html, add a bio that includes a link to your Google+ profile.

The image below shows the acceptable link format:











Ensure that your bio includes a clear means of identifying you as the author of the content, such as "By your name" or "Written by your name".

NOTE: The name you use must be the same as the name in your Google+ profile. Without that Google will not recognize you as the author.

If you follow those steps, your rich snippet should be showing fine after Google indexes your site.

Don’t take my word for it, though.

Head over to the Rich Snippets Testing Page and preview how a random post on your blog will look in Google search results.


Option 2: Claim your Blog Posts without a Domain Email

Some bloggers do not have access to emails at their domain.

This is especially true of bloggers who use hosted blogs by Wordpress, Blogger or other free web hosting solutions.

This is how to use rich author snippet in the event you have no email hosted at your blog domain:

Step 1: Add a link to your Google+ profile using the format in the image shown below:










Note: The anchor text does not have to be “Google”. You can change it to any word you like, but the only thing you are allowed to change in the link itself is your Google+ profile URL.

As stated already, a good place to place the link is the biographical area of the author profile, as shown in Option 1, Step 3.

Step 2: Add your blog to your Google+ Profile "Contributor To" field.

Step 3: Check out how your site will appear in Google using the rich snippet testing page.


Option 3: How to Claim your Posts on a Blog with Many Authors

If your blog has more than one author, it would be unfair for the admin to claim all the blog posts.

To give post credits to all authors, this is what to do:

Step 1: Each author on your blog will need to create a Google+ profile if they have not already done so. (Smart, Google☺).

Step 2: Each author needs to edit their profile to list your website in the "Contributor To" field. This step is very important to close the two way handshake.

Step 3: Install the Google authorship for multiple authors plugin. It’s simpler to go to Plugins -> Add New -> and then search for “Google authorship for multiple authors” in your WordPress admin.

Step 4: Update each author’s profile to include a link to their Google+ profile.























Step 5: If you can’t wait for your site to be indexed, test it out using the Rich Snippets Testing Tool.


Option 3: Use Rich Author Snippet for Guest Posts

These days, most bloggers publish more guest posts than they write on their own blogs.

If you fall in that category, then it makes sense to claim your blog posts, as their performance on the search engines will positively impact traffic to your own blog.

Step 1: Whenever you are working on a guest post, make sure you give the blog owner your by line in HTML format containing a link back to your Google+ profile using the rel=author attribute in the link.

Without that, your post will appear as the blog owner’s in Google search results.

Again, the link should be like:











Step 2: To complete the two-way handshake for guest posts, go to your Google+ profile and add a link to your “Contributor To” links. Note that you have to link directly to the guest post that has your rel=author link, and not to the blog itself.

If you link to the blog home, this may not work.

The scary part about claiming your blog posts is that if you are Danny Iny, your contributor to section may soon overwhelm you.

But it is worth it.

You can do anything to get your pretty face out there, right? ☺

Step 3: Check out how your guest posts will appear in Google search results using the rich snippet testing page.

Why You Should Implement Rich Author Snippet Now

1. Implementing Rich Author Snippets can dramatically improve your click through rates. 
2. It can also establish you as an authority by giving you face recognition in your niche.
3. It encourages deep browsing of your website by giving searches access to more of your posts through the “More by this Author” link.

So, what are you waiting for?

Yeremi Akpan (@yeremiakpan) is a writer, blogger and entrepreneur. His blog, ProBloggerTips.com teaches you how to drive traffic to your blog and build an engaged audience.