Add Rich Snippet Support in WordPress and Dominate Your Personal Brand

Google is providing a host of (relatively) new features that allow you to add “rich snippet” metadata to your web content. For those who design, write, and manage WordPress blogs, this is a powerful tool that can help you build your personal brand much more efficiently — the reason being that Google will display your author information in search results if you’ve properly labeled your metadata via the rich snippets markup! The reward for adding rich snippets of metadata is that as you get more blogs published with your name, your face or logo keeps popping up in search results. This is just one more crucial way to get your personal brand in front of people, and it’s easy to achieve in WordPress.

What Are Rich Snippets?

Normally, HTML markup is used for displaying content in a web browser. “Rich snippets” are a format of HTML that allow you to carefully define pieces of information within a web page so that search engines and other programs know what the heck the data is good for. Here’s an example of how you might normally introduce yourself: <p>Hi there! My name is Tara Hornor! Nice to meet you.</p> Using Rich Snippets, we can tell search engines who I am using code like this: <p>Hi there! My name is <span itemprop="name">Tara Hornor</span>! Nice to meet you.</p> You can define scores of items like logos, birthdays, product IDs, and much, much more. But, today I’m really only interested in me…or at least my standing as an author, so that my picture shows up prominently in Google search results. For much more information on rich snippets, here’s everything you ever wanted to know:

• Official W3.org Definition for Microdata (Rich Snippets)
• Schema.org Introduction to Microdata

Getting Started

For you non-web developer types out there, don’t worry about getting your hands a little dirty with some coding. I’ll walk you through it in baby steps. Note: You will need access to the “Appearance” -> “Editor” area of WordPress, which means you’ll need to be an Admin for the site. You can still complete Steps 1-3 on your own and refer your admin to Steps 4-5 if you are not an admin yourself.

Step 1: Your Google+ Page

You’re going to need a Google+ page for this to work. If you haven’t got one already, go set up a page really fast (it just takes a few minutes), and come back to this walkthrough. Go to the Signup Page for G+

Step 2: Contributor To…

To tell Google that you’re officially a contributor (author) for a site, you have to update the “Contributor to” field on your About page. Log in to your G+ page and click on the “About” tab: Now click the “Edit Profile” button in the upper-right part of the screen: Click on the “Contributor to” section. When you hover your mouse over the field, it will highlight the entire section: It’s very important to not include the “www” to the URL, as this will break the connection and Google will give you an error. Make sure the link is set to “Public,” and hit save to complete. You’ll need to click the “Done Editing” button as well in the upper-right.

Step 3: WordPress Profile

Log in to your WordPress website, go to the “Users” -> “Profile” section, and paste your G+ URL into the “Website” field: NOTE: Make sure you add “?rel=author” to the end of your G+ URL. This is very important. Now, my URL looks like this: https://plus.google.com/u/0/117883511520701899763?rel=author

Step 4: WordPress Editor

Next, we need to update your WordPress blog so that it automagically connects your G+ profile to your blog. If you don’t have admin access to your blog, then you’ll have to stop here. You will need to be able to access the “Appearance” -> “Editor” options within WordPress to complete this feature. Sign into your WordPress blog as an admin, and cruise on over to the “Appearance” -> “Editor” option (I’m using WordPress 3.3.1 for this tutorial): 99% of the time, you will need to edit the “single.php” file, but your theme may have the info you need in the “content.php”, “loop.php”, “functions.php”, or other file. In our example, we’re going to “functions.php”. What you’re looking for as you skim through your PHP files is the point where the WordPress theme posts the author content and date of the post. This is usually in the same area as the title of the post. In some themes, you can simply paste the following code and call it good: <a href="<?php the_author_url(); ?>" rel="author"><?php the_author('display_name'); ?></a> This calls your author website (updated in Step 3), and makes your name the link to your profile page. Most importantly, the href has the rel=”author” code, that tells Google that you are the author of the page. For the rest of us, using the default Twenty Ten theme in WordPress, here’s where the content I want to edit is displayed: In this example, we only need to make a single small change. In the part of the function that calls the href for the author URL, add the rel=”author” code: You can cover all of your bases by adding “me” to the rel=”author” so that Google can connect other information, like the author’s name to the profile: Now, we need to tell WordPress which URL to grab. By default, WordPress will link readers to your archive of posts, which is not what we want anymore. We want WordPress to link to the “website” field from the author profile page. To do this, we need to change this line of code: You’re changing the line from: get_author_post_url( get_the_author_meta( 'ID' ) ), To the code for grabbing the Author’s website: get_the_author_url( get_the_author_meta( 'ID' ) ), Once those updates are completed, save the file and you’re done!

Step 5: Testing The Results

To test the results, you can go to Google’s Rich Snippet Test page: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets Paste the URL of a post with the author’s name on it, and hit the “Preview” button: You’ll see the green confirmation at the bottom of the test, showing that the authorship has been verified. Congrats! You’re now an officially verified author for the blog, and your face, logo, and other metadata will begin showing up in search results. You’re on you way to personal brand domination! Have you grown your personal or company brand using rich snippets? Will you share any Google search queries to show off your results?

Frequently Asked Questions about Adding Rich Snippet Support in WordPress