Your About page is one of the most important pages on your site, says Lisa Banks in a post at the Site Reference SEO blog. Done right, it can help boost rankings and stimulate inbound links, she notes.

Banks' interest in About pages was recently stirred by influential blogger Chris Brogan's discovery that most of his site's readers were visiting his About page. And from Chris Lake's post at eConsultancy, Banks further learned that missing About pages are a major reason for visitors' choosing to leave sites without conducting business.

This all makes sense to Banks: You can't expect people to do business with you without getting to know you first, she argues—and many of them don't know about you when they land on your site.

To help, Banks offers tips from Web-usability authority Jakob Nielsen on how to develop useful About-page information that draws clicks and keeps users interested. Nielsen recommends presenting your information at four levels of detail:

• A descriptive tagline. On the homepage, briefly summarize what your organization does.
• More detail. At the top of the About page, offer one to two paragraphs about the organization's goals and main accomplishments.
• A fact sheet. Following the summary, develop a section that elaborates on key points and other essential facts about the organization.
• Additional information. Add subsidiary pages providing more in-depth or specialized information about the organization.

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