The highlighted results are accompanied by an author thumbnail on the left, while the popularity of the author is revealed by the his Google Plus circle count. This is another way Google results can standout and provide relevancy before even being clicked.

How to Add Google Authorship Markup on Your Website

The "standard" way of adding Google’s authorship markup is as follows:

1. Create an author page on your website/blog and provide detailed information about the author on this page. If your blog has multiple authors, you should create separate pages for each author, rather than adding all the author bios on a single page. While it won’t hurt to have all the author bios listed in your site’s official “about” page, you should create separate author pages for each author.

2. Every author should have a Google Plus account. On the author page, add a link to the author’s Google profile (or Google Plus profile) using the rel=”me” attribute.

To be more clear, you should use the following HTML code on the source of an author page: <a rel="me" href="http://plus.google.com/YourGooglePlusAccountNumber/">Anchor Text to your Google Plus profile</a>

The anchor text used above, is not a very important factor but it makes sense to use something relevant (e.g “Connect with me on Google Plus” or “My Google Plus profile”).

Note: Do not use the rel=”nofollow” attribute in this link. You must allow Googlebot to crawl this link.

3. Now you have to link your article pages to their respective author pages on your website. On every article page on your domain, add a link to the corresponding author page using the rel=”author” attribute.

Here is the HTML code: <a rel="author" href="http://yoursite.com/authorpage.html/">Author’s Name</a>

4. This is important. Have the authors upload a good, recognizable headshot as profile photo on his/her Google Plus profile. Next, they should edit their profile and add a back link to the author page on your domain.

Here is how you add the link from your Google Plus profile to the author page on your domain: