Have you linked your Google Plus page with your WordPress.com blog? Doing so offers you two benefits –
Of course, you need to take various steps to establish your Google authorship. But one of the first steps to doing that is claiming authorship for your online content.
Since most of the content I write falls under the category of ‘ghostwritten’, I had not give much thought to developing my Google authorship. However, an informative blog by Scott Buehler called the ‘ Ultimate Guide to Google Authorship’, proved to be an eye opener.
I have now claimed Google Authorship for my blog. Since achieving this required a fair amount of research, I thought I’d share the information and save you some valuable time in doing the same for your blog.
3 Steps to Linking Your WordPress.com website to Google +
Step 1. Connect the Google+ Profile with the WordPress.com website
It is as simple as going to your Dashboard>Settings> Sharing> Connecting Your Google+ Page and signing in. By doing this your Google Author snippet will appear at the end of each blog post. Take a look at the screen shot below.
Step 2. Validate that the Link is Working
Use Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool to validate that Google associates your blog content with your Google+ profile. Once you enter your website or post url on the this page and press preview, the result should display ‘Authorship is working for this webpage’. In addition, you will see your Google+ profile snippet. Refer screen shot below.
Step 3. Create a Google+ Badge on your WordPress.com website
While step 2 ensures that your blog is connected to your Google+ profile and your Google Authorship is confirmed, as an additional step add a Google + badge to enable your readers to connect to your Google+ page easily.
Now while Google has described the process for placing the Google+ badge on your blog, I found that the HTML code created by Google was not recognised by WP.
So instead, I followed the process of creating my own WP widget for displaying the G+ Badge. You will see this Google+ badge displayed on the right sidebar of my blog.
There you have it , the three steps to linking your WordPress.com site to your Google+ account. If you face a problem following any of the instructions, just drop me a line and I will be glad to help.
Now I move to the next challenge of expanding my Google+ circles 🙂