About Doorway Pages
By Rajesh. V. Tavakari
Posted Thursday, October 21, 2004
So how do you position your web site at the top of search engine results ? Use doorway pages. Doorway pages, also known as entry or bridge pages, are Web pages designed specifically to rank highly on the unique ranking algorithms of each search engine.
The two best things about using doorway pages is that they cost far less than other promotional tools such as banner ads, and they work better when properly designed.
To put it simple, a doorway page is created using the kind of text statistics and factors that make a page rank highly on a particular engine for a particular keyword or phrase.
A doorway is designed for the search engines, to make the search engines "happy". The doorway page then links to your main site and takes your visitors there. A web site is designed for people, to make people "happy", to fill a need, make money, whatever.
However, what is good for people is not always good for the search engine. If, for example, you have a web site that has a lot of graphics and hardly any text, or one that runs on a database and creates dynamically generated pages, or one that is in a highly competitive area, or even one that deals with a wide variety of general topics, chances are that your pages will rank very poorly on search engine rankings.
This creates a serious dilemma: how to make web pages that are both pleasing, useful, and logical to humans, and at the same time super-friendly to search engines.
For more information on Doorway pages read my article : Doorway Pages.
Usually, a page that ranks well on one engine may not rank well on other engines. Assuming that you want to make sure that you are ranked highly on the five top engines (AltaVista, HotBot, Lycos, Infoseek and Excite Yahoo does not accept doorway pages), you have to make five versions of each doorway page, each optimized for a particular engine.
What goes into the making of a doorway page?
First, you have to know that ranking criteria varies from search engine to search engine. Most evaluate the placement of keywords or keyword phrases on various parts of your pages based simultaneously on all these criteria:
1.Prominence of the keyword searched how early in a page a keyword appears.
2. Frequency of the keyword searched number of times the keyword appears. Be careful about this. Simply repeating the keyword will not work because grammatical structure and keyword weight also plays a role.
3. Site Popularity a few search engines consider how popular your site is when ranking.
4. "Weight" of the keyword that is the ratio of keywords to all other words. Each search engine has a threshold. If your page crosses that threshold, the engine labels it as Spam and ignores it.
5. Proximity of keywords how close together the keywords are to each other, especially when the item searched for is a phrase.
6. Keyword Placement these are the locations where an engine will look for the keyword, e.g. in the body, title, META tags, etc.
7. Grammatical structure some engines consider grammar in their calculations. They do this to make it harder for spammers to do their thing.
8. Synonyms some engines look for words similar in meaning to the keyword. As you can see, the ranking criteria is highly dynamic, using a complex algorithm that integrates all the above factors in various proportions and with various maximum and minimum values. An important criteria to look deeper into is the keyword placement criteria. These are the various places that engines look for keywords:
Proper way of using Meta Tags
1.· Keywords in the tag(s)
2.· Keywords in the
3.· Keywords in the
4.· Keywords in or other headline tags
5.· Keywords in the link tags
6.· Keywords in the body copy
7.· Keywords in ALT tags
8.· Keywords in
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