A doorway page is a very concise-focused page that is critiqued for a
specific search engine without having to redesign your existing site.
Optimize each doorway page for 1-2 keywords only
One of the most important things you can do to ensure a higher placement in the search engines is to design doorway pages.
(Note: A doorway page is simply a page that is created for the sole purpose of ranking higher in the search engines for a particular keyword or set of keywords. These pages act as "doorways" to the real content of your site, without having to redesign or remove content from your home page.)
There is some controversy in the past few months to the effectiveness of doorway page. I still use this technique {and I continue to do well with placement} and you can do well if the pages are created with the proper consideration of effectiveness without trying to spam your keywords and tags.
What do Doorway Pages Need?
Everything we've discussed leads to doorway pages.
If you have several keyword phrases you'll need to create a doorway page for each phrase. If you want to rank well under your company name *and* a keyword combination, create a doorway page for each. Each page keeping with the primary emphasis of the page on a single topic. From that page, you will provide a link to another page on your site.
Doorway pages need all of the basic META tags, title, description, and keyword tags. You also need to utilize ALT tags, hidden tags, headline tags, etc., for those engines that consider them for relevancy. All Search Engines are different - doorway pages will help you achieve a high ranking in one search engine without being penalized in another engine. Do not over use your tags.
You'll optimize each doorway page for one particular keyword phrase. If your keyword phrase is "overworked school teachers," you'll write your title, keywords, description and other tags for THAT keyword phrase, hopefully beginning your tags with THAT phrase if at all possible.
NOTE:
No other tag should come before your <title> tag. Some HTML editors love to stick in tags before the important META tags. Here's an example of such a tag:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN"> or
<META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="Adobe PageMill 2.0 Mac">
Be sure to check your source code, and if your HTML editor sticks in tags such as the above, delete it immediately, or cut and paste it below your important META tags. Keep an eye on how your program reacts to the change it may not allow you to delete the originators tag.
If you have a graphic, capitalize on it with an ALT tag with your keyword phrase in it. Stick in a hidden tag.
Note: These engines do *not* consider the comment tags for relevancy: Yahoo, AltaVista, InfoSeek, Lycos, Excite, Northern Light, WebCrawler, and LinkStar
Keep the text on the page down to a minimum, and use your keyword phrase {integrated naturally in your text} as many times as you can get away with. Don't use huge graphics on your doorway page, to where it takes too long to load. And, BEGIN your page with text, not an image.
In other words, take the concepts we've discussed and create a doorway page using those same concepts, optimizing the page for your particular keyword phrase.
More About Doorway Pages
If you use frames on your site, create doorway pages into the site without frames since using frames can cause ranking problems.
Doorway pages are very effective for search engine placement.
One thing to keep in mind: Yahoo! and many of the directories do NOT allow you to submit more than one URL or doorway page. You will have to read each Search Engine's criteria before you hit that submit button because you do not want to be penalized from submitting to any of the Search Engines.
The bottom line is, a web page will not rank well for *all* your chosen keywords in *all* search engines, so doorway pages help you solve that problem. Because you want your website to be found under several keywords or keyword combinations, you can create many doorway pages, each optimized to rank well for a different keyword in a different engine.
Let's say you want to target five keywords across ten search engines. You could end up with 50 pages pointing to various pages of your site.
Doorway pages have a real function. They don't have to look like "cardboard" pages. They can look exactly like any other page of your site-the only difference being that the page is optimized specifically for one keyword phrase ONLY, and usually for one engine only.
Doorway pages have a definite function. It's impossible to optimize a single page (your home page) for more than 1-2 keywords and be successful at it, unless they're not competitive keywords. So, if you want your site to be found under additional keywords, doorway pages are the answer.
Also, you can't optimize a single page for more than one or two engines and get it ranked high in them. A page created for Excite may not be worth a flip in InfoSeek. So, doorway pages allow you to create separate "doorways" into your site to take into account the preferences of individual engines *and* additional important keyword phrases that you want your site to be found under.
- Avoid naming multiple pages "index" as the prefix.
- InfoSeek requires a minimum of 75 words in the body of the page in order to index it, and Lycos requires a minimum of 100 words. So, your doorway pages for those two engines will be slightly longer. Infoseek prefers a keyword weight of 2-5%
- Name your pages after the keyword, such as "searchengine.html." If you create a page designed for a specific engine, you can name it "searchengine-is.html" for InfoSeek. However, avoid naming pages "searchengine1.html," "searchengine2.html," etc.
- Some Search Engines index only the pages you specifically submit and rarely spiders to another page. So, you should consider submitting all important pages individually to these engines. Read each engine's criteria first.
- Submit Your Important Doorway Pages Individually
- Your doorway page should have links to all the other pages of your site, directly or indirectly.
- Search engines that "spider" websites *should* index all the pages that make up your site, but they don't necessarily do so. Again, consider submitting all important pages individually yourself.
- Remember: Submit to the major search engines individually and do it yourself or have someone who knows how search engine work create and submit your pages for you. DO NOT submit to a “Let us submit your site to 500 search engines for FREE” this will not work for you or your business. You will have absolutely no idea how you are ranked or be able to monitor your progress.
- Most important Take copious notes when submitting and learn what works and what does not for each search engine. Submit to the top ten {10} search engines the rest will come. I would also suggest that you do not submit to the Yahoo directory until you know exactly Yahoo’s criteria for submitting.
More useful information on the pages listed below:
- How to Use Keywords
- Creating Keywords
- Keywords in Titles and Descriptions
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- Now that you have created your keywords and doorway pages your
next step will be to submit to the major Search Engines only.
I suggest when submitting that you work with the appropriate tools.
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