Authorship is the important act of attributing an article to a particular author. Authorship is important for relevance and authority. The principle is that people who are authorities in a field will submit novel and relevant content in their field of expertise. The more relevance and reliability of the content, the better the content is likely to be and the higher the search engine ranking position.

Steps

1. Create a Google+ profile (https://accounts.google.com/)
2. Ensure that you have an email address on the same domain as your content
3. Submit your email address to the Google Authorship page (you only need to ever do this once)
4. Verify your email from the message that you receive
5. Ensure that any articles that you publish include a clear byline that includes your name ("By Clinton Dickerson" or "Author: Clinton Dickerson"

If you do not have an email on the same domain as the content, then Google has introduced the use of the rel='author' attribute to allow authors to link authorship information to the search results. This link works hand in hand with Google +. See Google support for detailed information on how to set up authorship.

e.g. Clinton Dickerson on Google+