Sites to Get Free Links: Aboutus.org
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: - 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.
- 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.
- 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.