Maximize Your Visibility With Doorway Pages!

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, "ABC 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. It's simple - two doorway pages as follows:

http:// www. abc-software. com/ abc-software-av. htm (AltaVista-specific doorway page customized for your company name)
http:// www. abc-software. com/ utility-software-av. htm (AltaVista-specific doorway page customized for the keyword "Utility Software")

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. horse
2. performance horse
3. equine

The following Web page naming convention illustrates how you might name the individual doorway pages optimized to achieve a high ranking for each keyword:

http:// www. horsesite. com/ horse-av. htm (optimized for the keyword "horse" for AltaVista)
http:// www. horsesite. com/ performance-horse-av. htm (optimized for the keyword "performance horse" for AltaVista)
http:// www. horsesite. com/ equine-av. htm (optimized for the keyword "equine" for AltaVista)
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. You could create alternate shorter pages and name them accordingly:

http:// www. theraquine. com/ horse-short. htm
http:// www. theraquine. com/ performance-horse-short. htm
http:// www. theraquine/ equine-short. htm

Experiment with different pages and page names to describe these experiments, but be careful and do NOT go overboard.