I was at Blog Camp UK yesterday, sitting on a panel of PRs, taking questions from 100 or so bloggers about ways the two disciplines can work productively together.

That was the closing session, but before that, the incredibly smart and knowledgeable Lee Smallwood took to the stage and shared some tips on some of the things we can all do to improve how our blog’s rank on Google.

Author rank

Lee explained that there was a way to tell Google that you own a piece of content, and that doing so could help that content rank a lot more highly in search than ‘unsigned content’. Here’s an article on author rank and why it’s important.

Lee didn’t get a chance to go into how to do this in much detail about author rank as he was mobbed with questions from pretty much everyone there, including me, but I did a bit of digging afterwards and managed to figure out how to link my blog to my G+ profile. (When Lee puts his slides live – I’ll link across so you can see in more detail why this is important)

Here’s how I linked my WordPress self-hosted parenting blog to my G+ profile, so Google knows I wrote all the posts on there.

Taking author ownership of my blog with Google

1) I got a Google+ profile https://plus.google.com/u/0/114730564675993386882/ – actually I already had one, but if you haven’t got one, go to http://plus.google.com and get one set up.

2) Inside the WordPress dashboard, I went to Users, clicked on my profile and made sure the First Name and Last Name fields matched what I had in Google+. Then in the bio section, I added my description, plus a link to my G+ profile. I’m not sure this bit is essential, but the end of my bio looks like this: I’d love you to follow me on <a href=”https://plus.google.com/114730564675993386882/”>my Google Profile+</a>.

3) I went to by ‘About’ Page (http://www.amummytoo.co.uk/about-a-mummy-too/) and added a mention of my Google+ profile page. I linked on the phrase “my Google Profile+” and apparently the + on the end is important. The URL I linked to was https://plus.google.com/114730564675993386882/?rel=author and yours should look exactly the same, including the ?rel=author bit at the end, just change the long number to the long number in your profile address.

NOTE: If you have an email address on your blog domain (e.g. me@myblogdomain.com) you can skip the remaining steps. Just make sure you’re logged in to Google+ and register here.

If not, get ready for some PHP tweaking…

4) BEFORE YOU DO THIS PART, BACK UP FIRST – IF YOU GO WRONG, YOU MAY NEED TO RE-UPLOAD A FILE USING FTP.

Still in the WordPress Dashboard, I went Appearance > Editor and because I’m running Bee Crafty on Genesis, I went into Functions.php and found the function that said:

NOTE: Your code might look a little different, depending on your theme. If you don’t have functions.php, try looking in single.php and search for a phrase like “posted on” or “posted by” (or whatever the author, date credit days at the top of all your posts) – that will give you a clue. If you find the bit of code you need, but aren’t exactly sure how to edit it, feel free to paste it into the comments and I’ll reply asap.

5) I changed it so the code now looked like this:

IE I replaced the post_author_posts_link part with a link to my about page, anchored to my full name.

6) I went to any post on my blog and made sure that my name under the title linked to my ‘About Page’ (http://www.amummytoo.co.uk/about-a-mummy-too/)

 

7) I went back into my Google+ profile and clicked Edit

8) I clicked on the section that says “Contributor to” and created a new entry where the name is “+A Mummy Too” and the link was my about page ie http://www.amummytoo.co.uk/about-a-mummy-too/

9) I  checked it was all working by hopping over to Google’s Rich Snippets Testing Tool and entering the URL of any of my posts.

10) The results showed a snippet of how my post would look in Google search results, followed by a green message saying “Verified: Authorship markup is verified for this page”

 

That’s it, done.

If you try this, let me know if you hit problems and I’ll see if I can help.

Once you’re up and running, make sure you share your lovely posts on Google+ and let me know if it’s having any impact for you. I’ll do the same.