How to Setup Google Rel Author for WordPress
Google’s verified authorship enables you to associate your blog posts with your Google+ profile. By doing so, you can enable your blog posts to show a corresponding author thumbnail image in Google’s search results.
Why is this important? Two reasons:
1) increase click-through-rate (CTR) to your posts
2) increase visibility for your Google+ profile
If you have a WordPress site you can use one of many plugins or simply do it manually by configuring your Google plus account and including a Google rel=author tag on your posts.
Here is a step-by-step guide to add the google plus author tag:
1. Once you have created and verified your Google plus account, take note of your ID number that appears in the URL.
2. Go to your Google plus profile and click “About”.
3 . In the right-side sidebar, go to the Links section and click on the “Edit” link.
4. A new window will pop open where you will see a “Contributor to” section. Click on “Add custom link”.
5. Go to your WordPress them editor and open header.php. Include the rel=author tag inside the <head> section:
<link rel=”author” href=”https://plus.google.com/YourGooglePlusID/posts”/>
6. Test to confirm everything is working by including your site’s URL in the Structured Data Testing tool.
