For Google + purposes, should the author's name appear in the Meta description or title tag of my web site just as you would your key search phrase?

[lwnickens]

Relative to Cyrus Shepard's article on January 4th regarding Google's Superior SEO strategy, if I'm the primary author of all blog articles and web site content, and I have a link showing authorship going back to Google Plus, is a site wide link from the home page enough or should that show up on all blog posts etc and editorial comment pages etc? Conversely, should the author's name appear in the Meta description or title tag of my web site  just as you would your key search phrase since Google appears to be trying to make a solid connection with my name, and all content?

[lonniea]

Google recently introduced a new link attribute called "rel=author". This attribute allows you to tell Google who you are as an author and what articles you write. Google has indicated that they believe the authority of an author may even be weighted more heavily than traditional on page metrics, like page or domain authority. As Matt Cutts stated at SMX West, “The concept is that if an author is trustworthy, why does it matter what site the article appears on?”. Author authority also has implications for the impending Panda 2.2 update, which will affect the sites that steal content from other sites to post on their own. If Google sees the same article on 10 different sites, and 1 of those sites clearly identifies an author, marked up with the "rel=author" attribute, your site will get all the link juice.

For custom CMS, implement "rel=author" for blog posts and "rel=me" for author bio pages
    Watch for "rel=author" plugins for major CMS like Wordpress, Joomla, and Drupal
    Add "rel=me" to all external guest post links on your author bio page

You can pick up a great plugin called Google Authorship Widget @ wordpress.org
or visit the plugin maker @ digitalfair.tk

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Lowell,

To add to what Lonnie said, not long ago Google changed the instructions for adding authorship markup to your content. You can find the instructions here:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1408986

Adding your name to the meta description or title tag isn't necessary for authorship markup. But doing so is fine if you feel it will help your personal branding.

Just a note - Google's use of authorship is still in the early stages. It's unclear that following their instructions will have any impact on rankings or relevancy. That said, most SEOs that I know are adding this markup because even if Google isn't using it now, the undoubtedly have plans to use it in the future.