Authorship Markup will improve your search engines results performance and will boost your CTR. This kind of rich snippet helps you establish a tighter relationship with your readers, gives you more credibility and helps you become an authority in your niche.
Authorship Markup plugin is a Joomla extension which helps you display author information in search results for content. To display this kind of information, in search results, you will need to have a Google+ account, properly configured, having a clear and recognizable head shot picture as your profile photo.
How Authorship Markup works
By using a Joomla Contact and the Authorship Markup plugin you will be able to link each article to your Google Plus Profile. To met all authorship markup requirements you will also need to link back from Google+ to your website using the Contributor To option. After your pages are linked to a Google+ Profile and Google+ Profile links back to your website, Google Bot will start indexing and displaying your author information in search results.
Properly setup the Authorship Markup and your Google+ Profile
1. Download and install Authorship Markup plugin
2. Go to Components -> Contacts and create a new contact
3. Using Linked to User field link this contact with the author’s username (for example: Administrator)
4. Fill the Web URL / Website field with your Google Plus profile link (example: https://plus.google.com/116081960150890694911) and Save
5. Go to your Google+ Profile and click on Edit Profile
6. Click on Contributor to and add your website link (example: http://www.deconf.com)
7. You will have to display Author Name in each article, make sure that Author Name is set to Show on each article or that Author Name is set to Use Global in articles and is set to Show in your Section, Category or Menu.
Using this tool Structured Data Testing Tool you can verify if the author information is properly displayed in search results.