I’ve used this blog in the past to mention AJ Kohn’s awesome post on how to implement the rel=author tag, which inspired me to let everyone know how I (sort of) implemented google authorship markup on my site. I recently started seeing my thumbnail appear in many of the search results where ClickMinded is ranking, so I wanted to document what I was seeing for you.

(And if you’re not interested in this walkthrough, just watch Matt Cutts and Othar Hansson nerding out in this awesome Google Webmaster Help video on authorship markup).

Here’s how I did it:

- First, you have to sign up for Google+ . You probably already have an account and just aren’t using it. That’s fine. Just spruce it up, don’t liberally upload to it the way you would your facebook account, and start using it for work. Think of Google+ less of a social network and more of the author profile that will follow you around the web.

- Next, link to your author page in your Google+ profile

- Then, make sure all your pages (or at least your posts) are linking to your author page, with the  ’ rel=”author” ‘ tag included in the code. You’ll also want to include a link from your author page, back to your Google+ profile page, with a ‘ rel=me ‘ tag. I solved both of these problems by simply adding both these links to every page of my site, in the footer:

And here’s what the code looks like (click to enlarge, sorry!):

Finally, and most importantly, I forgot to request Authorship from Google, so make sure you do that!

And that was it! I now have verified authorship, my blog posts frequently show a thumbnail in the SERPs, and Google has laid the groundwork to let my authorship follow me throughout the web.

I haven’t seen any strong analysis done on whether or not CTR’s are going up, or how significantly they are helping (if at all). But, you gotta believe that being the only listing with a picture, in a sea of text, is going to be good from a eye tracking point of view. It is definitely worth it to get this done. It took me approximately two months to start seeing the image.

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Written by Tommy

Tommy Griffith has been doing search engine optimization for the last 4 years. He’s currently the SEO Manager for Emerging Markets at PayPal. He feels weird writing about himself in the 3rd person, but admits that it sounds slightly more epic.