Getting Your Face In Google: My Cardiff Internet Talk

A week ago (on 16th April) I gave a talk at Cardiff Internet, a local monthly internet marketing event aimed at small business owners. My talk was all about rel="author" implementation and its benefits, containing a live implementation demo on a WordPress blog using the Yoast SEO plugin.

The venue – Porter’s Cardiff – was awesome: the ‘Other Room’ which can be hired “houses a cinema style projector screen and theatre seats:”

Greg (@gregbednarski, CI’s organiser) also took some photos, which can be found on Facebook (you’ll have to login to see them though).

I’ve uploaded the slides to SlideShare:

 

It seemed a shame sharing the slides but for people to miss out on the live implementation demo. So… I created a screen capture video of it!

Video Transcript

Hello everyone. My name is Steve Morgan, @steviephil on Twitter, and in this video I’m going to talk you through how to implement rel="author" on a WordPress blog using the Yoast SEO plugin. I recently gave a talk at a local event, called Cardiff Internet, where I talked about how to implement rel="author", the benefits, and gave a live demonstration as well, as to how to do it in this way, to implement it in WordPress with Yoast SEO plugin. And passing the slides afterwards, it seemed a shame to just give the slides and people couldn’t see the demonstration unless they were at the talk, so I thought I’d record it as well, so that people have that as well. You can have both the slides and the demonstration all accessible online.

Okay. So I’m going to jump into Firefox, and I’m going to be implementing it on this website. This is my colleague at Box UK, Gafyn Townsend’s blog, BrandAge Design. He’s kindly given me his permission to implement it on his blog for him.

So here’s his Google+ profile. One the things I’m asked him to do in advance is to add BrandAge Design in the ‘Contributor to’ section in the About Section of his Google+ profile. It’s the one of the two things you’ve got to do in order to verify to Google that you are attributed to that blog and you are an author of that blog.

So I’m already logged into the WordPress dashboard. You can see here that the Yoast SEO plugin, also known as the WordPress SEO plugin, is already installed. Before I continue, this is the rich snippets preview tool. It lets you see, well, you’ll see for yourself, now. If I preview one of Gafyn’s blog posts, you’ll see it gives you a preview of how it should look in Google, and as you can see at the moment, it’s just showing a plain listing, with just the title, URL, and meta description. As you can see down here, it says: “Page does not contain authorship markup.” So it’s not currently installed. I just wanted to show that first of all.

So if we go back to WordPress, all you’ve got to do, it’s so simple, it’s brilliant… you go to All Users. We’ll go to Gafyn’s user. Now the Yoast SEO plugin adds this field once it’s installed. I don’t think this field was here before. If you don’t have the plugin installed, I don’t think this one’s here. It’s your Google+ field, and basically it wants you to put your Google+ URL in there.

So as you can see here, I’m going to grab Gafyn’s Google+ URL, which is traditionally plus.google.com/a-whole-bunch-of-numbers. Put it in there. Put in [?rel=author] afterwards, which is a way of acknowledging to Google, saying: “hey, yeah, I am acknowledging this for authorship purposes.” We’ll update the user.

And now if I preview it… ta-da! Gafyn’s Google+ profile is now attributed to all of his blog posts on BrandAge Design, past, present and future. So all of the posts, not just that post, but all of the posts on the site that he’s written so far and any future ones will automatically have that sorted out.

And let me just give you a demonstration of what Yoast has actually done. If I refresh the page now and visit the source code, it’s basically added this in the <head> of each page. Not every page on the blog, just the pages where Gafyn’s an author. And it’s basically just a nut and it will do that for every new post that Gafyn writes. It’s really as simple as that.

So I hope that’s been helpful, and thank you very much for watching. So my name’s Steve Morgan, @steviephil on Twitter. My blog is seono.co.uk, and thank you very much for watching.

In addition to doing the talk at Cardiff Internet, I also did a shortened version the following day at Box UK as a Tech Talk, an internal talk for colleagues. There are only minor differences in the slides, but if you’re interested, they’re also on SlideShare.

Cardiff Internet talk photoI hope you find it useful. If you have any questions or hit any hurdles implementing rel="author" yourself then feel free to tweet me.

I’d also like to thank Sean Grey (@SeanCGrey) of Confidence On Tap and Gafyn Townsend (@Gafyn) of BrandAge Design for being my guinea pi… err, I mean volunteers for Cardiff Internet and the Box UK Tech Talk (and also the screen capture video), respectively. I’d also like to thank Ben Thomas (@Nonentity) for recommending Screencast-O-Matic for creating the screen capture video.

[Cardiff Internet talk image credit: from the Facebook set, with Greg’s permission]

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