How to Link a Google+ Profile to a WordPress Blog And Verify Authorship

Google+ has a nice option where you can connect your existing WordPress sites to a specific Google+ profile. It allows you to verify your WordPress blog authorship with Google+. Let me show you an example so you know what I’m talking about.

Even if you don’t know what Google+ authorship is or how it works you are probably already familiar with the following search result display:

As you can see there is a thumbnail of the author and it’s coming directly from his Google+ profile. Research has shown that it increases click through rate significantly. I don’t know exactly why but from a user’s point of view I’m thinking of the following facts:

• Thumbnail of the author is likely to catch user’s attention when they scan through the search results.
• Users feel more confident when they see a snapshot of the author. It also ensures them that they are likely to find relevant content on the author’s site.

How to Verify Google+ Authorship

Usually people just add a piece of code to their WordPress theme header and it’s done. But I don’t want to assume that you feel comfortable playing with code. And that’s what WordPress is all about. WordPress makes everything easy for you. You would never have to touch a single line of code. You should be able to do everything with a few point and click, which is why I’m going to show you the easiest and the quickest way to get your WordPress blog authorship verified with Google+ profile.

You may have heard of a seo plugin called WordPress SEO by Yoast. Almost every WordPress site owner now uses this plugin. In fact, I personally use this plugin and I’m a big fan of it. In my opinion, there is no other free WordPress SEO plugin that can come close to this. So if you want to optimize your site with the best SEO practice you would definitely want to use this plugin. However, I’m not going to talk about the functionality of this plugin in details. I will just run you through the option that helps you verify the Google+ authorship.

After you install the plugin go to your WordPress Profile page from the Dashboard.

Scroll all the way down to the Contact section.

You will see a text field for Google+ (by default it’s not there. WordPress SEO by Yoast added this new field). Enter the URL to your Google+ profile here. Click on the Update Profile button at the bottom of the page.

Great! you are almost done here. Now all you have to do is login to your Google+ account and add a link to your site so they are both connected. First, go your Profile and click Edit Profile. Switch to the About tab. Move to the Contributor to section and add your Website. You can add as many sites as you like if want your other sites to link to the same Google+ profile. Click Finished editing when your done.

And you are done! The next time Google bot crawls your site hopefully it will notice these changes and once indexed the site should start to show up in the search result display page with your Google+ author information.

I guess that’s all from me today. If you have any suggestions feel free to share it in the comment section below.