Update on Adding Your Name and Image to Google Search Results

Back in August 2012, I had written a blog post about using a little bit of metadata (specifically, the rel=”author” tag) to link to your Google+ page, so that Google search results for your work would feature your name and image.  

I’ve been praticing what I preach since then, using that metadata on my own posts here.  Nearly five months later, I get this email in my inbox from Google:

After blogging with this code for ~5 months, Google finally is giving me the nod that they will start putting my image next to search results that come up with my writing.  As usual with anything Google, this isn’t a guarantee for anyone, and is surely based on a complex algorithm of the frequency of my content, coupled with other secret sauces.  

Just reiterating something here about any SEO strategy: consistent, timely updates are key to letting the big search engines know that you’re reliable and authoritative.  It can take a while for these efforts to work, and you shouldn’t abandon any SEO efforts after a short period, even if you don’t see results quickly.