With the exception of Yahoo!, you can submit more than one URL
to a search engine. A doorway page is simply a page that has
been created for the sole purpose of ranking higher in 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 the content of your site.
You can create doorway pages to take advantage of a search
engine's criteria for a specific keyword or keyword combination.
Let's say you want to rank well on AltaVista for the keyword
combination "Utility Software" and for your company name,
"Smartbuzz Software." Build one doorway page for your company
site that is specific to AltaVista, and another customized
for achieving the best ranking for "Utility Software" at AltaVista.
Then, customize the META tags, body copy and everything else
on the doorway pages to gain an advantage for that particular
keyword in AltaVista, emphasizing primarily that keyword on
that page. In your sentences, try to fit in other keywords you
want to target as well, but keep the primary emphasis of the
page on a single topic. You will then want to add a link on
that doorway page to the home page on your site.
Doorway pages help you solve the most troubling web marketing
dilemma:
The techniques that get you a high ranking in one search engine
can get you penalized or even removed from the index of another
search engine. It is impossible to design a single page that
will rank well for all of your chosen keywords in all engines.
Since there are so many sites indexed by web search engines,
the content of your page must be very focused to rank well
in today's overflowing search engines.
Most companies want their web sites found under several keywords
that their prospects are likely querying in search engines.
For this reason, you'll want to create separate pages that
emphasize each of those keywords. Look at an example of a
web site of a company that would like to rank well for searches
on keywords related to horses. This company would like its
site to rank well under three keywords in particular:
1. Cat
2. Performance Cat
3. Equine
Remember you can create dozens of these doorway pages, each
optimized to rank well for a different keyword in a different
engine.
Typically, when targeting five keywords across eight search
engines, you end up with 40 pages pointing to your home page
or other section on your site. Don't worry, this is not unusual.
If you are cautious and heed the warnings below, you won't have
any problems.
WARNING #1:
Some search engines will consider the act of creating dozens
of nearly identical pages as "spamming" their index and could
remove your pages altogether. This is most dangerous when
you either inadvertently (or intentionally) cause dozens of
your site's pages to rank well for one keyword search. The
poor search engine user is returned 30 matches, all of them
going to one of your doorway pages and looking identical or
very similar! If your competitor sees this, you can bet they'll
inform the search engine in hopes of getting your web site
permanently expelled from the search engine.
This form of spamming also devalues the search engine. Nobody
wants to scroll through dozens of duplicate sites to locate
the information they need. Unless you run the CNN web site
or some other huge content-based site, chances are you don't
have something to please everyone.
You can avoid potential problems by creating "doorway pages"
with different content that describes your product or services
briefly and then linking them to different pages within your
web site. If the content that these doorway pages link to
involves different topical information or products, and you
don't create more than a couple pages for each keyword, no
one is likely to complain. Make the content of each doorway
page vary, and you won't be breaking any rules.
WARNING #2:
Some search engine "experts" have long advised that you simply
create copies of your index page (and make changes to a page
to emphasize different keywords) and name them index1. htm,
index2. htm, index3. htm, etc. Doing this only asks for trouble
since anyone seeing index10. htm is going to know immediately
that you've got at least nine other copies of your home page
out there. If one of your competitors complains to a search
engine, you then run the risk of getting dropped from the index.
The search engine could easily red flag pages that are named
this way in order to spot potential troublemakers.
Tip: Some techniques work better than others, depending
on the engine. Sometimes, a shorter, more concise page will
rank higher on AltaVista than a longer one.
Experiment with different pages and page names to describe these
experiments, but be careful and do NOT go overboard.
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