Why is it important to add Authorship to your Website

You might have seen these days that a photo of a person appears when you search for something using Google search as shown in the below image. And it's usually the author's photo or the person who has contributed in writing that particular article. I did a site search in Google and the query is "site: howtotechguru.com" and the result appears with a list of my articles in this website. Here you will find only my photo as I'm the only contributor or author of all the posts that's written till date and also because I have enable authorship in my website. If you have a website or blog with more than one contributor then the author of that particular post will appear next to the article.

[caption id="attachment_2341" align="aligncenter" width="568"] Image Source: Site Search of "How To Tech Guru". Image shows author's photo.[/caption]

It is important to add Authorship to your blog post or website because it clearly shows to everyone including search engine that you are the author of that particular post. By adding authorship your website or blog ranking might increase as per Google engineers (it's too early to say as of this writing) and is still in it's experimental stage. By adding authorship your photo may show up in the search results write next to search results with your articles. Also, it shows to everyone that you are the original author of that article and hence that post might get a higher rank when compared to a website which has your content copied.

There are multiple ways to do that. If you have a website or blog hosted using Wordpress then there are various plugins available which can be installed like Google Authorship, Jetpack etc. If you want to enable Google authorship then you need to have a Google Plus account in first place so that these plugins can link to your Google Plus profile. If you are not using Wordpress then you can add it yourself by placing rel=author or by signing up for Google Authorship. It's a two way communication - that is, you need to approve it from your profile by adding the website link in your profile as well.

There are two ways in doing this. One is to link your website directly to your Google plus profile. The second option is to add a link in your website to your bio page in your website. And in the bio page link it to your Google plus profile. The same applies to multi author websites.

Note that this option is not mandatory as of this writing. It's just a good practice and standard followed by Google. It's upto you to decide on adding authorship to your website or not. I would recommend adding it. Adding rel=author is not just for Google bots but would help even other search engines.

If you like this post then don’t forget to share it with your friends and follow us on Social Media or subscribe to our blog via email.