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What is Google Authorship?

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Donncha Hughes

Sole Trader/ Proprietor
Donncha Hughes is a mentor, trainer and business advisor. I deliver group and one to one training on Wordpress. My background is assisting business with development of marketing, business plans, grant and finance applications. See www.startuphughes.com for more...

When you write a blogpost, and Google presents it in a list of results following a search, your Google+ image will appear in the results if Google Authorship is activate. People are then more likely to click on the result and visit your WordPress blogpost.

Google Authorship Donncha Hughes

Google Authorship helps with SEO (see this article for more on the issue of rankings). It works for your own site and is well worth setting up as per this blogpost which lists  7 Google Authorship benefits beyond SEO.

It also works on other sites that you contribute to.

Google Authorship Tweak Your Biz

The starting point and all the instructions are on this page from Google

https://plus.google.com/authorship

A few comments on the instructions:

#1For this to work you have to have a Google+ account. The google account should be based on the email that is attached to your blog (ie donncha@startuphughes.com for my blog based at startuphughes.com/blog). You may have set up a Google account with your gmail. I think you can add (merge) your business email to this account or go ahead and set up another Google account https://accounts.google.com/NewAccount so that your business email is your primary email. Click on the option to use your own email address and not a gmail email account.

 #2 The instructions require that the same name as the Google account be mentioned as the author. A byline with your name is automatically added by WordPress so I suggest that you create an Editor with your own name and assign all posts to your own name as opposed to Admin which might be the default setting.
Once this is set up, Google Authorship is active for all Blogposts.