Sites to Get Free Links: Aboutus.org

    Posted by Pete Caputa on Jan 22, 2008 11:05:00 AM

    This is part of a series of posts about how to get free links pointing to your website in order to raise your search engine rankings and generate direct traffic from other websites.

    Site: Aboutus.org is a wiki, a website that anyone can edit, similar to wikipedia. Except, Aboutus.org's goal is to create a wiki about people, websites and topics. Whereas Wikipedia is a wiki about topics and things. If you try to build a page on wikipedia about you or your business it'll probably be deleted, unless you are Steve Jobs, Warren Buffet, GE or Microsoft. Aboutus.org encourages you to do it.

    Quick Instructions: Your first step is to create a page for yourself. They want you to use your real name. You should. Here's my page. Notice that I created two links under "My websites" for PC4Media and Hive411: Online Business Growth Network and Online Networking and Link Building for Local Businesses with good anchor text. You'll need to learn how to create a link in a wiki, which is different than writing html, but very easy. Your next step is to create a domain page for your website. Follow the directions about "Domain pages". Here's mine. Assuming your website is designed well, it automatically grabs a title, description and logo when it creates your domain page. Don't forget to go and add additional links that point to important parts of your website with the right anchor text.  I created a link called "link building" which points to my blog tag page on "link building". I'll be adding more as I blog more about keyword research, content management, lead generation and lead tracking, etc.

    You can also add your business to topic pages. I added HubSpot and PC4Media to the internet marketing page. Also, if you have the cash, consider sponsoring a portal.

    Those instructions didn't turn out to be so quick. However, your time spent on Aboutus.org building links will be well worth it. Here's why...

    Benefits of Getting a Link from It:
    1. Search Engine Optimization. Hell yeah. Here's Aboutus.org's website grader report. Aboutus.org has a page rank of 5/10. Google thinks aboutus.org is important: They've indexed 650k+ pages of the site. Further, you can create any link on your page - within reason and with good faith - with good anchor text. Link building sites don't get any better than Aboutus.org. And the nicest thing about Aboutus.org, if the community continues to keep out the riff-raff, it's creating a really worthwhile service for all of us.
    2. Secondary Search Result. Again, I'm going to go with "Hell Yeah". If you are going to have another website come up in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) for a search for your name, wouldn't you want it to be one that you can edit? That's what Auboutus.org does. We'll give it a day or two, but I'm hoping that Aboutus.org edges out the guy that owns pc4media.com in a search for pc4media. This guy is definitely capitalizing on the pseudo-popularity of my blog. He hasn't built a website for someone in at least 2 years.
    3. Direct Traffic. Yes again. Although probably without the "hell" prefix. According to the website grader report, Alexa puts Aboutus.org in the top 1% of traffic garnering websites out there. But, my guess is that most of the traffic comes from search engines and leaves fairly promptly. But, I bet there are also some power users on there. Probably SEO professionals. Regardless, I'd expect some traffic from it as if it were a rest stop or reference check between you and the search engines.

    Topics: SEO, search engine optimization, link building

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