In 2011 or thereabouts Google began promoting an idea of using "rel=author" attribute links to help add some metadata to the Internet that helps to identify authors. The effect has been that Google search results for pages that have rel=author links, is that next to the search engine results is a picture of the author and a link to their profile page. This is cool and gives authors a little more visibility.
Here's a sample
Google has some instructions:
Author information in search results
The method is pretty straight-forward, just follow the instructions
