By Kendra Leah, @Writing2Day

Recently, I added Google+ to my armory of social media marketing. I did have an account set up but it was linked to YouTube after Google bought them out. This would not be a problem if my son was not so into watching and commenting on Mind Craft videos on YouTube. Unfortunately, those comments were showing up on my Google+ profile which does not look good on a professional page.

I really had discounted Google+ only because I am already feeling overwhelmed trying to keep up with the many different social media platforms nowadays. While doing research, I came upon a term I had not heard before – Google Authorship. My curiosity was peaked so away I went on the web to find out what it is all about. 

What is Google Authorship?
Google Authorship is a cool little tool that links content you post on your Google+ profile page to the articles on your website. Google states they created Authorship “to help users discover great content.” I think they are also using this tool to promote Google+ but you can benefit from this.

Immediate Improvement in Search Results
I thought I would put Google Authorship to the test to see how it affected the search results for a few of my blog articles and a web page on my site. The results were instantaneous. I posted three articles from my blog and one web page on my Google+ profile page. Only one of these pages was showing up on the first page of the Google search results. This page went from being the fifth result on the page to #2. The other three pages could originally be found only after going through several pages of the search results and now they are all showing up near the top of page one.

The one catch I can see is that by raising my articles to page one of the Google search results, the results are now pointing to my Google+ profile page. Once there, a person must click on the link in the post to go to the article or blog post on my actual website. You do have to weigh the pros and cons of this. However, if your webpages are not currently showing up in at least the first two pages of the search results, I think it is a good trade off. It will be very interesting to see if the traffic to my website increases as I add more posts to Google+.

How To Set Up Google Authorship
I am going to leave it to the webmasters at Google to explain the procedure to you.
Click here to get started.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 30th, 2014 at 11:44 am and is filed under 5. Advertising Your Online Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.