Do a little research, I dare you. I found no less than 7 ways to set up Google Authorship on your website. Now below is a mix of all the things I learned from research in attaching the Google plus authorship to a client site. We had done it before, but of course life happens and when you are learning something new about SEO everyday old information fades. Note setting this up I used a self hosted WordPress site, not a wordpress.com blog.
Now the reason we were changing the authorship was because the initial author was not someone who was creating or reposting content aimed at the subject of the website.
For example Bob’s House of Monkeys should be authored by someone who likes Monkey stuff on his Google Plus account.
1) Get your Google Plus profile in order.
-This includes making sure your profile picture is an actual person and not a logo.
-Make sure you have listed on your Google Plus profile that you are a Contributor to the website you are going to author. It’s in the Contributor section on the right hand side of the profile. Add the url of the website you want to author.
2) Verify on your Google plus profile an email address that has the domain of the website you are going to contribute to. bob@bobsmonkeyhouse.com . To do this add the email address in the email section.
3) Go to your WordPress url that you are going to author. Go into the Dashboard. Go to Users. Go to create User. Set up new user and in the section for type of user choose AUTHOR. Also put in there your Google plus link that you are attaching.
4) Go to Yoast SEO section of your WordPress dashboard. Click on Titles and Meta and then click on the tab HOME.
Enter your Google plus Authorship here too. For example it should look like this https://plus.google.com/115575143807167827477/posts (Use your own personal Google plus profile, click on profile and grab the url at the top ending in the word posts).
5) Go to Google Authorship page https://plus.google.com/authorship. You can verify your Google authorship here using your email address (bob@bobsmonkeyhouse.com)
6) You should be good to go! Verify and see if it is attaching correctly by using Googles Rich Snippets Tool
Now while having the headshot and authorship are great for SEO and are very helpful in encouraging click throughs from the SERPs… it may not always show up. Google only uses its if all the stars are aligned. And Google’s stars aren’t always aligned.
UPDATE: It is very important that if you are going to use Authorship that attach it to an active an authoritative profile. In my opinion. If Bob’s only post’s once a year and it’s about ultimate death cage fighting then it’s not going to help and in fact in one case I studied it hurt.
Robin Moody
Octane Marketing Solutions
Marketing Solutions for the Southeast
SEO Manager