Tips on Marketing Your Own Site
Tips on Search Engine Positioning (Part IV): Doorway Pages
In the concluding chapter of our four-part series on Search Engine Positioning, we focus on a marketing tool that has proven quite effective in helping webmasters gain additional traffic and visitors to their main sites. We're talking about Doorway Pages.
Doorway pages are pages that have been developed to rank highly for one search engine and 1 to 3 specific keywords or phrases. They are also known as "gateway," "bridge," "entry," "jump" or "supplemental" pages.
Doorway pages stand on their own, separate from the rest of a main site. Their primary function is to act as an additional entry point that will direct
visitors to a main site. Therefore, to be effective, they ought to be favorably placed in a search engine so that people are more likely to find them and
in turn, act as an entrance for visitors to the main site where the relevant information can be found or where transactions can be undertaken.
Elements of doorway pages include (a) title/logo; (b) text and (c) links that encourage visitors to enter the main site. Doorway pages typically don't contain complex table layouts, extensive JavaScript, or a lot of images. File sizes are typically low - about 45K and below.
There is a controversy, however, as to whether some doorway pages can be considered 'spam'. There is actually a very thin line between when a doorway page enhances the search
results and when a doorway page becomes spam. Each search engine has the authority to define when webmasters like you are spamming them, so you should
put some careful thought into exactly what you are going to create.
Search engine innovations like themes, link popularity and click-tracking enable them to gauge whether pages submitted to them constitute spamming or not. Search engines are getting better at looking at the whole picture, not just one page. But sophisticated doorway pages (those that contain unique optimized text) are still an excellent way to rank with the search engines. And if your web site has dynamic or otherwise "un-spiderable" content,
doorway pages may be the only solution.
Here are some useful tips that you can use in developing effective doorway pages:
Keep your doorway pages simple and relevant. Doorway pages are created to rank highly with a search engine for a specific keyword phrase, and not to impress viewers with extensive content and fancy designs. Make your pages look professional and appealing. If a doorway page has been stripped of artistic content, it may be considered spam. If you plan on creating several doorway pages, make sure that there are substantial differences on their appearance. Doorway pages that appear to be identical may also be considered spam. This most often occurs when a webmaster optimizes slightly different versions of the same page to rank highly for slightly different keyword phrases. When submitting to a directory or designing your title, try to make the doorway page title start with the number '1', the letter 'A' or some other letter low in the alphabet. Many directories list websites alphabetically. Having one of your keywords as your doorway page's domain name will increase your ranking with some search engines. If you are using this approach to get the maximum boost from your keywords, try to separate these words in your domain name with a hyphen. Go easy on the Meta Refresh tag on your doorway pages. The meta refresh tag that is used to catapult a viewer from one page to another, might also be considered spam. This technique was abused extensively by the XXX industry, and as a consequence, many engines now consider any type of Meta Refresh spam. If you must redirect, use JavaScript or some server side function and delay the redirect for as long as possible. A length of 10 seconds should put
you in the safe zone.
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