The curriculum is organized around how search engines actually work, not around what's easiest to teach. That means starting with foundations before tactics.
Each module builds on the previous one. You can't make good tactical decisions about your author site without understanding the foundational concepts first.
Before making any changes to your author site, you need to understand what search engines are actually doing when they visit a page. This module covers crawling, indexing, and ranking at a conceptual level. Not technical jargon, but the underlying logic that makes everything else make sense.
Topics include how search engines discover pages, what they read and what they ignore, how they store and categorize content, and how they decide what to show for a given search query.
This module is about search behavior specific to book discovery. Readers searching for their next read use different language and different patterns than people searching for most other things. Understanding this shapes every content decision you make.
We look at genre-specific search patterns, how readers describe books they're looking for, what kinds of searches lead to author website visits versus retailer pages, and how to identify the searches that are most relevant to your specific books.
With the foundation in place, this module gets into the specifics of author website content. How to write book pages that communicate clearly to both readers and search engines. How to structure your author bio. What your homepage needs to do from a search perspective. How series pages work differently from standalone book pages.
This is where the practical application happens. We work through real author site examples and show what changes make a measurable difference in how search engines interpret the content.
The final module covers the technical side of author site SEO and how to maintain and monitor your site over time. This includes structured data for books, site speed basics, mobile usability, and how to read the signals that tell you whether your changes are having an effect.
We also cover what to do when search engine behavior changes, how to evaluate new SEO advice you encounter, and how to keep your site's search performance stable as your publishing catalog grows.
A lot of SEO advice for authors jumps straight to tactics. Add this keyword here. Use this heading format. Build links from these sites. Authors follow the advice, see mixed results, and don't know why or what to adjust.
The reason is that tactics without context are fragile. When something doesn't work, you can't diagnose it. When something does work, you can't replicate it. When search engine behavior changes, you don't know how to adapt.
Our sequence is deliberate. Foundations first. Search behavior second. Content application third. Technical and monitoring fourth. By the time you're making specific changes to your author site, you understand why each change matters.
The examples, case studies, and exercises all use author websites. Not e-commerce sites, not service businesses. The context is always book publishing.
Romance, thriller, literary fiction, and nonfiction each have distinct search patterns. The curriculum acknowledges these differences rather than treating all books the same.
Search engine behavior evolves. When changes affect the guidance in our curriculum, we update the relevant modules rather than leaving outdated information in place.
We explain why each recommendation makes sense given how search engines work. You leave with understanding, not just a checklist.
Understanding where your author site stands now gives context to everything in the curriculum.