Not long ago ProBlogger, the popular site about making a living in the blogosphere, wrote a list of five ways to get your blog indexed by search engines in 24 hours. It was a great resource for bloggers launching their sites for the first time, listing many sites that can help you get noticed quickly when you’re starting a new blog.
But ProBlogger did leave out one powerful tool for getting your site indexed fast: an AboutUs page filled with rich content. Here’s our take on his advice for getting indexed, as well as how a free page on AboutUs.org can augment what you’re already doing.
- Blog Communities: Blog communities are basically a social network for your blog and for bloggers. These community portals are similar in AboutUs in some ways, but are exclusive to blogging. Getting a profile for your new site that is branded appropriately and is SEO-smart (i.e. proper keywords and tags) is a good way to get Google or Bing to notice your blog. Some top blog communities include, in order popularity: MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, Blogged and NetworkedBlogs.
- Site Valuation & Stats Sites: This is one area where all the old school site valuation and statistics shops might help you, even if you might never return. Directories like WhoIs and analytics tools like BuiltWith will definitely help with getting indexed.
- Feed Aggregators: Feed aggregators such as Feed-Squirrel, OctoFinder, and FeedAdage will take any feed you’ve submitted, track your new posts, and index them in their site. All this creates another way for search engines to index your growing site fast, and it’s free traffic, since the feeds contained on those sites link back to you.
- Social Sites: Social media is the avenue for getting readers that everyone is talking about these days. Now, treating Facebook and Twitter purely as tools for getting indexed by Google quick isn’t a sustainable strategy. But setting up Twitter and Facebook pages early on that obey SEO best practices will definitely be a big boost for you. More social sites especially relevant to getting your blog discovered are Digg, StumbleUpon, and Delicious.
- Misc Sites: There are a few other sites ProBlogger mentions that might be appropriate if you really want to hit it out of the ballpark. ChangeDetection is particularly relevant to blogs, since a public listing will track updates to your site and publish them in a news section on their site, which will in turn get them picked up by search engines. A site that traditionally has been very big for getting your blog noticed by both Google and readers alike has been Technorati, the blog search engine. Technorati used to be the premiere site for finding and ranking blogs, but it’s fallen by the wayside in recent years. Some news outlets have reported that Technorati may be changing its strategy yet again, so be sure to tread carefully.
- With AboutUs: Three key characteristics make AboutUs a powerful resource for getting your blog indexed quickly. First, like many of the other sites listed above, it’s free. All it takes is an account, which you can create in about 60 seconds. Second it’s quick to create and update. No waiting for us to pre-approve updates or verify your account, just hit edit and save, like any wiki. The faster you get rich, original content on your AboutUs page, the more good it does you.
Last but not least, it’s simple. Improving your AboutUs page with a little original content that is accurate and well-written will not only be useful to those visiting AboutUs.org directly, it will help on the SEO side as well. For some tips on easy things you can do with any AboutUs page, check out our series on Five Simple Ways to Improve an AboutUs Page.
Comments on this entry are closed.