A year ago Google added authorship markup feature into search results. What it means? When you search for something in Google, you can see some results with a small author’s profile photo. For example if you type ‘TOP 10 Football Coach Celebration’ in Google, you will see the first result with my photo in snippet. In this tutorial you will learn how to do that.

1. Create a Google+ page if you don’t have it.

2. Add a photo to your profile. But note that it must be a real photo with the face.

3. Login to your WordPress powered site.

4. Install a WP plugin that will add Google+ field into your profile information. There are few plugins that can do that but not all of them works fine with each template. I used this plugin http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-authorship-for-multiple-writers/.

5. Go to your Dashboard -> Users -> Your Profile.

image_1

6. You will see a Google+ filed above the Avatar area.

image_2

7. Copy your Goolge+ profile link and paste it into the field.

image_3

image_4

8. Once you have add the link, you must be able to see the highlited code on your single post page. (NOTE that it must be a code of the post published by you or by the user you’ve made the changes to)

image_5

9. Go to your Google+ page and switch to the “About” settings

image_6

10. Add the link of the blog or your author’s page to the contributor section

image_7

11. If you did everything correct, you must be able to see your photo in a rich snippet testing tool here http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets#.

image_8

In few weeks Google will reindex your page and you will see something like this.

The tutorial above works also if your WordPress site has multiple authors. You just need to repeat 5-11 steps for other authors.

Cheers!