Posted in Website Design Tips	July 25, 2008

Looking for niche keyword phrases to amplify your results in search engines? How about a name?

If you’re looking for quick ways to build your page count and add content that is easily indexed by search engines, don’t forget your authors and editors.

An author landing page is a page dedicated to a particular author or editor on a website, listing all the content written by the person. These pages came into existence when publishers started noticing on their internal search logs that a lot of traffic arriving at their site was coming in via organic search on one of their website’s authors.

Creating author landing pages is relatively simple. The most frequently used method for collecting unique and endearing bios of your staff is by telling your authors to create the bio themselves.

To optimize conversion rate on your author landing pages, make sure you include any free report or product that the author contributed to. Below that, you should have an automated list of every article written by that person.

Make sure that you scatter the authors name about the page so that when someone searches for an author or editor, your site comes up. The fact that most people have somewhat unique names makes these pages an ideal top listing in search engines.

So if you’ve got em, flaunt em.

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About.com doesn’t take their author landing pages lightly.

The way things work at About.com is that they hire one author per topic of interest. The author is paid on a rev-share model from advertising, and some About.com authors make as much as 100k a year.

Every author on About.com has his/her own main page with a bio. In addition to this, they have a blog page that lists their About.com posts, their own forum, and a dedicated email newsletter to the topic that the author manages.

For example,  Daniel Kurtzman manages the topic “political humor”. When you get to that topic on About.com, you’ll see his smiling face over on the left hand side and his name twice at the top of that page (once linking to his author page).

On Daniel Kurtzman’s author page, you’ll find that his name is listed in the meta title, multiple times in the meta keywords, and seven times on his Author page itself. This is one highly optimized author landing page.

Adding all of your contributors onto one page is not doing you any SEO favors. If you understand SEO, you know that target niche phrases are the easiest phrases to be found in search engines with; and what’s more niche than a name?