Authorship rich snippets, which is almost a year old, is the little bit of code (rel=author) that gives you the opportunity to officially claim your content with Google. Doing this comes with 3 great benefits.

1. Increases your click throughs. When your content is marked up properly Google includes your G+ profile image next to the listing within the search results. There have been countless studies indicating this increases your listing's click through rate. People are naturally inclined to look at images in a body of text.

2. Protects Your Content. This code also tells Google that you are the original owner. If your article gets picked up and reprinted Google is more likely to see your marked up article as the original and de-value the rest.

3. Increases your content's authority and trust. This is the most important reason to markup your content. When you officially claim your content using this code and tying it to your G+ profile you're also building up your own personal brand. The more trusted, quality content you produce for authoritative sites - the stronger your brand becomes in the eyes of Google as well as within your Industry.

How do we know this? Well a little over a year ago Google's 2005 Agent Rank patent was pulled apart and re-examined. The most memorable of these being SEO by the Sea's report, where Bill Slawski examined this specific aspect of the patent:

"The identity of individual agents responsible for content can be used to influence search ratings.

Assuming that an agent has a high reputational score, representing an established reputation for authoring valuable content, then additional content authored and signed by that agent will be promoted relative to unsigned content or content from less reputable agents in search results."

When looking it over the patent goes into detail about 3 important things.

• A method for agents to claim their content.
• A way to receive, track and even grade digital signatures from agents.
• A program that would have the ability to receive, organize and credit content to agents.

At the time the patent was released there was no system in place to track and database the 'agents' (aka authors) Google was referring to. However, 7 years later we had both G+ and the authorship rich snippet effectively making the patent a reality. Combine that with the continued onslaught of Google updates targeting low quality, duplicate and spun content and the Author Rank update starts to make a lot of sense.

All things considered, it seems like a no-brainer to add the code and instantly have your profile picture showing up for all your content. Well, if you haven't actually tried to implement this tag - let us tell you, it's not all sunshine and roses. In the past you could follow all the directions and the snippet still wouldn't show up. So it came as no surprise to us when Conductor released a study showing that 9 out of 10 tech blogs didn't have authorship snippets in place even when they know the importance of the tag.

Here's the Good news! Google released this Authorship form that allows you to officially register yourself as an author within G+. Upon testing this form, it took about a week for the snippets we were once struggling with to start showing up in the search results.

Get Your Authorship Snippets Showing in the SERPs in 5 Simple Steps

• 1. Be sure your rel=author snippets are in order on your sites. Google has great directions on that within their Content Guidelines. This is a simple line of code so don't be scared off.
• 2. Use Google's Structured Data Testing Tool to be sure your snippets are written like they should be.
• 3. Fill out Google's Authorship form using an email address that matches the domain of your most important content ie: yourname@yourdomain.com
• 4. Go to your G+ Profile and click Edit then scroll down and be sure that you have the main domains you contribute to listed under Contributor to.

You're done! Just check the SERPs in about a week or so for a piece of content that you've added the markup to and you'll see your hard work has paid off. Once officially set up with Google you can quickly see your face coming up for all the sites you contribute to - even if you haven't claimed them within G+. This is a process you will have to go through only once and believe us when we tell you it's SO worth it.

The future of Google is brand heavy. Now is the time to build your personal brand so that when Google continues to flush the countless low quality sites from their system and moves onto the pieces that haven't been officially claimed by their trusted authors - you'll be left smiling back at them from the search results.