Promoting Your Site With Doorway Pages

By Mathew Zupanec
Posted Thursday, October 21, 2004

Over 95% of Web users find what they are looking for by visiting the top 6 search engines. And everyone agrees that, If your site doesn't rank in the top 10 or 20 when doing a keyword search at the top search engines, your target audience won't be able to find you.

WHAT IS A DOORWAY PAGE? Doorway Pages (also known as bridge pages, portal pages, jump pages, gateway pages, entry pages) are the best solution for many Webmasters to rank well for a specific keyword. They are pages specifically created for a keyword phrase and optimized for a particular search engine. These pages then provide a link to your main web site.

WHAT DOES A DOORWAY PAGE LOOK LIKE? Make the doorway page in a way it makes sense to the person viewing the doorway page. If the content on the doorway page is not interesting and compelling enough, the surfer is very likely to simply click on the back button of the browser and move on to other sites.

HOW TO MAKE A DOORWAY PAGE? Your first step is to decide upon the exact keyword phrase you wish to target. Picking the correct keyword phrase to target is very important. Each doorway page will target a specific keyword phrase (only one for better result). Never use more than 7 keyword phrases in the page.

Try to create a doorway page without using this components:

- No image maps
- No background images - No frames
- No embedded sounds
- No Java
- No JavaScript
- No banners
- No counters
- No words written in the same or similar color as the background
- Nothing complicated or intricate (CGI or FLASH pages) - No "refresh" tag

(NOTICE: I deliberately change all the ""s to ")" in the codes below. As many email programs now read HTML, they may display the HTML codes like the way you see them in your browser. When that happens you will not be able to see examples.)

Page TITLES
This area is one of the most important factors when ranking highly in the search engines. Write page Title with keyword phrase at beginning, about 7-9 words maximum in length. Example: (TITLE)Doorway Pages for Webmasters(/TITLE)

Meta DESCRIPTION Tag
Describe your web page with the keyword phrase at the beginning of the description, about 15 words. Example: (META NAME="Description" CONTENT="Doorway pages also known as bridge pages are HTML pages designed specifically to rank highly on search engines.")

Meta KEYWORDS Tag
Place keyword phrase at the start of the tag. Do not put a long list of keyword in the keyword meta tag. Keep the number of meta keywords down to around 6 words or so. Example: (META NAME="Keywords" CONTENT="doorway pages, bridge pages, doorway bridge")

Meta ROBOTS Tag
One other meta tag worth mentioning is the robots tag. This lets you specify that a particular doorway page and linked pages should be indexed by a search engine. Example: (META NAME="robots" CONTENT="index,follow")

HEADINGS
Some of the search engines give extra relevance to keyword phrases that appear within a heading tag. The best doorway pages will include an (H1) tag with the keyword phrase and one or two subtitle tags containing other key phrases. Example: (h1)Doorway Pages(/h1)

ALT
The ALT tag defines the text to display for a graphic if the user has graphics turned off, or if they put the cursor over it in web browser. Some search engines will look for keywords in the ALT tags. Example: (IMG SRC="logo.gif" ALT=" For More About Doorway Pages, Click Here"(/a)

BODY TEXT
Add about 200 to 400 words of content where the keyword phrases are repeated three or four times in different ways. Use complete sentences, make each sentence different.

COMMENT
You can insert hidden "comments" into your page that are not visible to the user. A couple of engines will read this text. Example: (!--Begin Doorway Pages Navigation--) (!--End Doorway Pages Navigation --)

HYPER LINKED TEXT
Use one or two hyperlinks. We suggest two links, if possible. This helps avoid the problem of being considered "spam". Example:
(a href="(http://www.yoururl.com)")More About Doorway Pages(/a)
(a href="(http://www.yoururl.com/help.htm)")Click Here For Help(/a)

FILE AND DIRECTORY NAMES
Be descriptive with your file and directory names. Make sure at least one keyword phrase appears in the folder and file name and try to put it at the beginning. Always use hyphens (-) or underscores (_) to separate the words in your file and directory names. Example: doorway-pages/doorway-bridge-page.htm

Before you create your doorway page make sure you visit this site where you can find example of doorway page. (http://www.neocitizens.com/doorway-page.html)

TIP:
Place the copies of your doorway pages at somebody else's server. They will have a different address but will perform the same in bringing you extra visitors.

About the Author
Mathew Zupanec webmaster of NeoCitizens.com's Doorway Pages
NeoCitizens.com is the fastest growing doorway pages creating and hosting service. Move into a home a receive 1 MB (up to 100 doorway pages) of FREE web space to create your own doorway pages optimized for AltaVista, HotBot, Lycos, Excite, Infoseek and other search engines. (http://www.neocitizens.com)