How to Link Google+ Author Names to Profile Pages on Your Website

By Jesse Stay from Google+ Marketing For Dummies

In the event that your website has individual profile pages for each author, you can link author names back to the profile pages on your company website. You can also tell Google, on each of the profile pages on your website, that the profile page itself is associated with a Google+ profile. This is a great way to give authority to your brand.

Instead of using an <a> link tag like you do if you’re just going to link directly to the author’s Google+ profile, on the profile pages on your own site you’ll put the invisible tag <link> in the <head> section of your HTML. It’s structured just like the <a> tag, only users don’t see it unless they look at the source of the profile pages on your website.

The end <link> tag looks something like this:

<html>
<head>
<!--Other stuff can go here. The user doesn’t see this→
<link href=”http://profiles.google.com/jessestay” rel=”author” />
</head>
<body>…</body>
</html>

With the <link> tag on each author’s profile page on your website, Google now knows the associated Google+ profile for that author — and can properly link that person’s profile information with his or her content in Google search results.