An article at the Filipino Bloggers Worldwide blog showed me the importance of rich snippets for my blogs. According to that article, rich snippets may make my blog to be more likely “clicked” by the users of Search Engines. The article also said that rich snippets increased the click through rate (CTR) of some websites by 30%.
Of course I want the CTR of my blogs to increase. I want my blog posts to stand out in Google, Yahoo!, Bing and other search engines. I want the search results pointing to my blog to look like this one:
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Rich snippet is a “few lines of text that appear under every search result”. An example is the rich snippet shown on the above photo. Rich snippet is more than just a few lines of text because it shows more elements like star ratings and photo of the author of the article.
Unfortunately, it is the search engine that controls what will show up on the snippet of each search results. I can’t control what Google will show to my users of their search engine. What I can control is setting the authorship of my blogs.
I searched for the easy way to set Google authorship but what I saw requires me to tinker with HTML. I don’t want to play with HTML so I went to Blogger Dashboard to look for a solution.
I am successful because I found the easiest way to establish my Google authorship.
It is OK if you don’t have a Google Plus (G+) account yet. Your G+ account will be created automatically once you finished the steps I outlined here.
Setting Up Google Authorship in Blogger
Step 1. Go to your Blogger Dashboard. Click the Google+ button located at the left column of the screen.
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Take note that if you choose to upgrade to Google+ your Blogger profile will be replaced by your Google+ profile. Also, all of your blog posts will link to Google+. Lastly, information on your Blogger profile will not be transferred to Google+ so you must get a copy of those data before proceeding with this step.
Click the check box in the beginning of the “I've read the above and fully understand that…” statement and then click the “Switch Now” button.
Step 2. The “Add blogs to your profile” window will appear. Check the blogs that you want to link to your Google+ profile and then click the “Add Blogs” button.
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It’s done! Your blogs are now linked to your Google+ profile. To check, go to your G+ profile and look at your “About” page. You should see your blogs under the “Contributor to” section of your profile.
Here are my blogs as shown on my Google+ profile:
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Please add me to you circles if you already have a G+ account. Once again, here is my Google Plus profile.
Check Google’s Rich Snippets Testing Tool to see how the rich snippet of your blog will look like. Here is a sample of my rich snippet as shown from that tool:
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You successfully set your Google Authorship If you see your G+ photo on the snippet.
Setting the authorship of your blog is so easy. That is why there’s no reason for you not to do it. I highly recommend that you link your Blogger and G+ accounts now so as to have a better rich snippet for your blog.
Information about the rich snippets was obtained from an article at Filipino Bloggers Worldwide blog.
Do you found this post helpful? Do you have other tips? Please tell us by leaving a comment.