As you probably know by now, Land Surveyors United Network has as one of its primary goals to help professional land surveyors maintain and build bulletproof reputations online.  With that said, it is high time for you to claim ownership of all of your wonderful stories and articles here on the network. On way to do this is to tell Google that you wrote what you wrote.  Here is how to do just this.

Google now routinely highlights author information in search results. For instance, if you are looking for gadget reviews on Google and one of the search results is pointing to a column by David Pogue, you might also see a thumbnail image of Pogue – picked from Google Profile – next to the snippet. Google may also display the circle authorityin case that author has a presence on Google Plus.

Here’s an illustrated tutorialon how you may display your own profile picture in Google search results next to articles that you may have written on your website or on someone else’s website. You need to create a Google+ profile and then link it your website using the rel=”author” markup.

It takes some effort to implement the authorship markup and the other big hurdle is that it requires you to edit the HTML code of your website. Some authors may find it too technical while others, think guest contributors, may not have access to the site template at all. Fortunately, there’s now a simpler optionas well.

You can Setup Google Authorship using Work Email

Instead of modifying HTML templates, you can just include your name and email address on a web page (using the mailto syntax) and Google will automatically connect it to your Google Profile. Here’s how:

Step 1: Go to your Google Profile, page, click the Edit Profilebutton and then add a Work email. Make sure that the visibility of this email address is set to “Anyone on the web.”

Step 2: Click Verify to verify your email address. You’ll then see a little “tick mark” next to your email address in Google Plus – see example.

Step 3:Next open any of your web articles that you would like to “claim” in Google Search and add either of these two lines in your article:

Option 1: Use both email address and name together <a href="mailto:[email protected]">LSU Justin</a>

Option 2: Link the author's name to his Google+ page Send <a href="http://plus.google.com/111469484153302555478">LSU Justin</a> an email at <a href="mailto:[email protected]">[email protected]</a>

The important point is that all web pages, that you have authored, should include your name and your “work” email address that you previously verified in Google Plus. That is the only signal Google can use to verify your content ownership.

You may also like to include one or the other inside your TEXT box on your Land Surveyors United Profile