Introduction
Many people who contribute to the web and create useful webpages do so on somebody else’s domain. For example, many hosts offer free webpages using their domain in exchange for putting ads on your page. Factoidz includes pages written by contributors who are not related to the Factoidz companies. News aggregators cannot be responsible for the pages they distribute that are created by individuals and shared across the web. This article is written to help answer questions regarding SEO using somebody else’s domain.
Terminology
First, let’s be clear on the difference between a website and a webpage. A website is a large collection of webpages, usually on a single domain and hosted by on a single server. The webpages themselves are what users interact with and can be of many diverse types and varieties, containing numerous forms of content. We’re going to be talking a lot about SEO which stands for Search Engine Optimization, and is just a fancy term for how likely a search engine is to display your website to a user. In addition, we’re also going to be talking about "webpage SEO" which concerns how likely a search engine will display your specific webpage, rather than the website domain.
Focus on Your Webpage
Most of these SEO tactics involve techniques such as offering a scheduled disbursement of new content, promoting a long-term stable domain registry, aggregate traffic allocation, and most commonly of all, maintaining a strategically effective network of link partnerships.
Part of the point of this article is to tell you not to worry about any of this stuff for the purposes of promoting a single webpage. If you’re only concerned with attracting traffic to one particular page (such as your profile, gallery, or advertisement) you don’t need any of that. As part of a larger, established website you already enjoy most of these benefits.
Links
So how do you promote your individual webpage? We start out by talking about "backlinks", that is links on other pages that link back to your webpage. As a general rule, the more backlinks you have from credible websites with strong SEO, the better. This means, you’ll want backlinks from webpages that are indexed by Google such as informative websites and the like that aren’t protected behind usernames and passwords. You’ll want quality sites with strong content that don’t have millions of other links going elsewhere.
Backlinks are always good — you want to work on these. However, your primary consideration when deciding which websites should link back to you shouldn’t be on your SEO, but rather your potential viewers, readers and customers. Don’t forget that backlinks aren’t just an SEO concern, they are an effective promotion strategy unto themselves. Place your links in areas and ways that will get readers to notice and click on them to come back to your site. It doesn’t have to get any more "strategic" than common sense and good marketing. Even if it only marginally helps your SEO, it is still a worthy area to focus on in regards to attracting traffic to your webpage.
Getting Recognized
A search engine won’t display your site to anyone if its not aware of your existence. For the most part, this isn’t usually a problem, since large websites will be "crawled" by search engines as they go through the website’s pages one at a time. However, not all websites allow search engines to do this, so make sure your on a website that is making itself available to search engines before trying to promote yourself through SEO. Even if your website allows itself to be indexed by crawlers, this process can still take days, weeks, or even months before your individual webpage is added to its internal list.
Give the search engines a hand. Find the link directly to your site, and submit it directly to the search engines. If you go to Google, Yahoo, MSN, and all the other major search engines, they all have a submit button hidden away in a corner somewhere, often at the top of bottom of the page. Submit your webpage to them by giving them the direct link and a description. It may still take a couple weeks before your webpage is inserted into the search sequences.
Content and Keywords
The final, easiest, and most important aspect regards the actual content (text) of your web page. The search engines don’t read your content like a human would. Rather, they analyze the content and take statistical analysis of which words you use, how often, and where. The easiest way to manipulate the results of this search is to focus your attention on building "keywords" into your site.
Keywords are words that are used frequently throughout your site, and interspersed as much as possible. Choose whichever key words you want that relate to your webpage, or even phrases of keywords. (Phrases of two or three words generally perform better.) You’ll want between 4-6 keywords. For example, a webpage about chocolate ice cream might have the keywords "ice cream", "chocolate", and "chocolate ice cream". (These would be considered 3 different "keywords".) Hopefully, when someone searches for "ice cream", my webpage will turn up. (The website my page is a part of will likely be listed first, with my own specific webpage and its description underneath.)
Once you’ve decided on your keywords, you’ll want to make sure they’re interspersed throughout your article. You’ll want some in the beginning, some in the middle, and some in the end. You should try to get some in the first and last sentences, if possible. Your title should have keywords in it as well. If your webpage has pictures, include "alt tags" in the html code that include your chosen keywords. The main body of your webpage should have keywords that occur in 3-6% of the text. Many basic text analyzer tools can be found online and will help you to determine your most common words or phrases and how frequently they occur.
Synergy
Finally, it should also be noted that the regular production of new webpages with good SEO will help to increase the overall SEO of the entire website, and all the pages within it. You receive many automatic SEO benefits to being part of a larger website, but you also help to build up that website’s online reputation for all the other webpages connected to it.
