Your website is your online brand. Optimizing it for people and for search engines gets your brand in front of a larger audience.

Contributing author Lisa Barone is co-Founder and chief branding officer of Outspoken Media Inc, an SEO consulting company in Troy, New York. Her article, SEO Stumbles To Avoid, tells you how to optimize your site like a pro. She points out that the better you optimize your site for people and search engines, the more money you can make.

The Learn section of AboutUs.org offers a wealth of articles and tools for business owners. Browse Learn, and let us know if there’s a new topic you’d like us to cover. Got an online marketing idea to share with AboutUs visitors? Let us know: Editor@AboutUs.org.

We try to offer great customer service here at AboutUs.  Many people who call us are pleasantly surprised to reach a real person, especially because they’re calling about the free services available on our site.

AboutUs.org is the largest editable index of websites, with a wiki page for each of millions of sites. People often call about websites that are listed on AboutUs, and we try to help them find some contact information. Sadly, we often provide more help than the company that actually owns the website. Many sites don’t even provide contact info.

The Home Page Analysis section of our Website Visibility Report offers a lot of information about how well a site’s home page has been optimized for search engines.  We know that search engine optimization (SEO) isn’t the easiest thing to understand, so in addition to explaining it on AboutUs, we invite people to contact us with questions.

Here’s what a lot of people are asking us, and what we’ve been saying:

#1 What’s an H1 heading?

An H1 heading is a specific HTML tag on a web page. It creates a heading that stands out and tells both people and search engines what the page is about. For more information, read our article, How H1 and Other Headings Help SEO.

#2 What’s the canonical URL issue and how can I fix it?

A 301 redirect (also known as a permanent redirect) can help consolidate your website and SEO goodness so that it’s not spread between two URLs or twin home pages such as http://example.com and http://www.example.com. Setting up this redirect can be tricky, and if you don’t know how to do it yourself, you can ask your website hosting company to do it. Or ask the person or company that set up your website in the first place.

#3 How can I use AboutUs to help promote my website?

Our goal is to help you and your website. You can use AboutUs to promote your site in several ways:

• First off, there’s a wiki website profile page about your site that you can edit. (Find it at www.AboutUs.org/YourWebsite.com.) Tell people what you want them to know about your site and your company – that helps you build your brand and web presence on a large site that gets lots of visitors. If you create a good page about a good website, we will make the page’s links to the site DoFollow (the opposite of NoFollow links, which don’t help SEO).  Just email us at DoFollow@AboutUs.org, and ask us for an editorial review. Don’t forget that when you edit a page on AboutUs.org, you and your site show up on the home page of AboutUs. For bonus points, use your real name to create your account, and add a good portrait of yourself to your profile page.
• We want to help you navigate the ins and outs of marketing your business on the Web. Our library of articles about online marketing is growing, and it’s free. Is there a topic that you’d like us to write about? Comment below or email Editor@AboutUs.org.
• The Home Page Analysis section on the AboutUs page about your website has specific information about possible problems and missed opportunities for SEO on your website, with tips for improvement.

Have a question? Give us a call at 1.800.AboutUs or 503.488.5763, or choose a different way to contact us. We’re happy to help.

We sent out our newsletter last week, you can view it here.

It highlights our DoFollow policy, simplified account preferences, and some recent articles about internet marketing. It’s also an invitation to take our survey to let us know what features would help you improve your website.

If you’re not signed up for our newsletter, please sign up!

Linking is easy on the AboutUs wiki, so we’ve set up a LinkingGuide to help folks understand what types of linking that are the community standard here at AboutUs.

Basically it is like this, if you are editing the AboutUs wiki page XYZ.com – it is cool to link to the XYZ.com website from there. However it is not considered constructive to link a different website, say FGH.com. If you mention FGH.com in the course of providing information about XYZ.com, then we ask that you use an internal WikiLink to the AboutUs wiki page about FGH.com.

example:  [[FGH.com]] = FGH.com

Linking to different websites other than the one you are on, looks like spam to us.  That is because an AboutUs page about a website is about that website. (Social Media links, like facebook, twitter, etc. are ok)

If you are writing an article on your expertise, or creating a list on a topic you know – or even when you’re editing your own personal page, and you want to link externally, we encourage you to use the LinkPair template for any website you mention.  LinkPair creates both an internal wiki link and an external (visit) link:

{{LinkPair|Google.com}} = Google.com (visit)

Many times that was insufficient, because you never called the website XYZ.com – and you never call it that, you call it XYZ.

I figured out today some long lost knowledge!  How to label these links:

{{LinkPair|Google.com|Our Google Overlords}} = Our Google Overlords (visit)

Template fun!! see more templates you can use on AboutUs (visit).

At AboutUs, we’re always trying to help people learn about websites. We’ve just introduced a new feature intended to help people understand how websites appear to search engines, and how they can alter specific elements on their own site’s home page to make it more visible to search engines.

While the Online Visibility Audit is still pretty new, we’re hearing that it’s useful to website owners who want to make their sites easier to find in search engine results. The audit discusses details such as page headings and which words on a site’s home page appear to be keywords. The audit also shows the descriptive text that search engines are detecting on a site’s home page, and how they’re likely to display that text in search results.

One website developer tells us she has used the Online Visibility Audit to show prospective customers what a good job she’s done for current clients. Another AboutUs member tells us he’s picked up a couple of tips for improving his site’s home page.

You can check out the Online Visibility Audit for any website by going to AboutUs.org and entering the site’s domain name (for example, “AnyDomainName.com”) in the search bar at the top of every page.

Scroll to the bottom of the page, and you may see that the audit is already there. If not, you’ll see a button that reads, “Audit this site.”

Click the button and in a few seconds, you should see, in blue letters, “Ready! Click to reload.” Click that button, and you’ll have the visibility audit, ready for your perusal.

We know that websites are always changing, so we try to revisit every website frequently enough to refresh the audit. Since we can’t be sure we’re revisiting every website every time it changes, we’ve also got a button you can click to refresh the visibility audit.

The Online Visibility Audit is pretty new, and we’re still working on it. Expect additional information in the future, and in the meantime, please let us know if you discover any issues with it: visibility@aboutus.org.

A renewed focus on usability was one of the top ten things we celebrated at the end of 2009. We’ve continued that focus in 2010, and the latest result of that focus is the new look for our search experience.

The new search on AboutUs.org is unique because it was inspired by unsolicited feedback. Specifically, we caught wind of a tweet from user experience designer Derek Keevil (@hatsharpener) that offered some honest criticism of how our search result pages looked.

Derek clearly felt frustrated, so we continued the dialog on Twitter and later over email to get a sense of how we might make it better.

He gave us several very detailed suggestions; the general thrust of the feedback was that the search results were too un-styled to properly find and identify the information our visitors needed. And we agreed.

The new look for our search includes not only a restyled search bar, but a complete revamping of how results are organized.

The most striking change is that we used colored headers to divide the results into the two basic types of page on our site: Lists and Web Sites. Another change was the use of subtle background color to more clearly mark the small band of AdSense ads above results. We hope this and the rest of the new AboutUs search improves findability on the site.

AboutUs, as a company and a community, has always been open to constructive criticism. Being able to improve AboutUs.org based directly on what people have asked for is one of the pleasures of being a business that interacts on the social Web.

Please feel free to reach out to us, with your questions and comments about the new search or anything else, in the comments of this weblog post, or any number of ways including: Twitter, Facebook, or GetSatisfaction.

A core value of wiki and AboutUs is change is cheap.   Making changes is as fast as clicking edit, making your change, and saving.  And because we easily can, we push changes to key wiki pages on our site often.

So unlike many websites, not only are we changing our site’s content all the time, but our developers are also pushing changes like bug fixes and feature improvements almost daily.

However, it’s rare for us to do a visual layout change.  But yesterday we did and re-learned how cheap and fast change can be in a do-ocracy.

We brainstormed a simple change to scooch the content of AboutUs.org up a little to ditch some unused space, and during that very meeting Reid and Didip started pairing on it.   A few hours later they pushed the changes live!

Here is the before and after:

Other design changes made just recently include some de-cluttering by removing the various ads and boxes from the right of pages (and moving the recent contributors/page views box into the top right of pages), removing categories (which were replaced by tags some time ago) from domain pages, and highlighting lists on domain pages.

Since adding a Featured List Keepers box to our homepage in August, we recently added another way to highlight the lists that the AboutUs community and our writers are creating.

If a site is included on a list, its domain page will highlight and link to the lists that it is on.

If you want to add a website to a list you can try adding some tags to its page, which may tie it to a list that has already been created.  Or while on any list you can also add a site directly at the bottom left.  See this page for more details.

You can also create a list of your very own!  See our List Keeping page or email Lists@AboutUs.org to learn more or get started.

Today we also added the ability to link from one list to another within its descriptive paragraph.  Check it out on the Portland startups list that AboutUs’ CEO created.   To see how it works click “edit” on that list, and for instructions see this page.

Back in April I reported that AboutUs pagecount tops 14 million*.  I missed the 15 million mark by 200K.  Oops!  Once again the disclaimer applies that we still don’t have a way to filter out stubs, redirects, etc. So here you have it from the stats page:

Site wide Statistics

Last Updated: Fri Aug 28 07:39:04 UTC 2009

AboutUs statistics

There are 15,248,689 total pages in the database. This includes “talk” pages, pages about AboutUs, minimal “stub” pages and redirects.

1,118,537 files have been uploaded.

There have been a total of 19,295,496 page edits since AboutUs was setup. That comes to 1.27 average edits per page.

Today we added a Featured Lists section to our homepage.  In recent months we’ve had a growing community of people creating and tending lists of the best sites about topics that they are passionate about.

The Featured Lists section on the AboutUs homepage is our way of showing off AboutUs’ new-ish feature (lists!) and the fantabulous early adopters (we call them “List Keepers”) who are creating one-of-a-kind lists with the initial tools we have to offer at AboutUs.  Their input–past and future–will continue to make the tools and lists “Better, Stronger, Faster.”

A list is a unique way to share your knowledge of a topic that you care about, while helping guide people to the best sites about that topic.

If you’re interested in working on a topic that you care about:

• Email Lists@AboutUs.org and we’ll get you started, or
• Go to our ListKeeping page and dive in!