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It’s surprising to hear how many people in internet marketing have not heard of AboutUs.org. This self-proclaimed wiki of websites is a huge catalog that presents Wikipedia-fashioned pages of information about any website on the internet. The only issue is that it relies on someone to notify it about a new site (that’s you).

When you visit AboutUs.org, you’ll want to create your own free user account, which unlocks all of the other administrative features on an AboutUs website profile page. Start out by adding your own websites, one by one. All you have to do is type in the URL (without the www is fine; i.e., “mysite.com”) into the search box. AboutUs.org will then say that it has never heard of the domain before, and will start to create an automatic page for it. Once your new page has been generated, the URL might look a little off: simply click the tab for “fix caps” to re-type the domain name.

This page lists basic information about a website: an “about” section allows you to write a content-rich explanation of your site. Be sure to use all of your Wikipedia.org knowledge to create both internal and external links within this paragraph, to help it rank higher and be more relevant. Just be careful with the amount of external links you use; this is a moderated website, and someone will catch on to what you’re doing if you misbehave.

An “address” section allows you to post this website’s brick-and-mortar location (or P.O. Box). It’s great for a website that has an office or location, but rather worthless if it is nothing more than a website.

“Related domains” is a section that will suggest related sites based on your site’s metadata. It helps for internal ranking of your AboutUs.org page, and nothing more. These related sites don’t point outward to the sites themselves, but only to their own AboutUs.org pages.  Similarly, the “keywords” section pulls your site’s META keywords. You can add or subtract to this list. It’s always a good strategy to include both short-tail (even 1-word) keywords in here, as well as long-tail keywords.

Lastly, “External links” is a place where your Alexa.org, Whois.net and Quantcast links will be automatically included for your site. You can remove these if you’d like. I personally put a backlink to my homepage in this section, as well as links to major press releases, or even social media accounts for the site.

In all, AboutUs.org is a decent free service that acts like the Wikipedia.org page you’ll never own for your site. It’s yours to modify, and the site itself is relatively ok with its users’ self-promotions. Be sure to make your page look and sound professional: don’t dump keyword-loaded hyperlinks and call it a day. Make your site look interesting.

Also, note that AboutUs.org will probably rank on the first page of Google for a search of your own domain name, making it fill in yet another spot on that page.

Even though it’s NoFollow, AboutUs.org is a great backlink source that should be one of your first stops after publishing yet another brand new website in your repertoire.