Get Rid of Those Doorway Pages
By Windsong

Getting traffic to your site is the ultimate goal. Without the traffic, you site isn't going to do much but take up cyberspace. Now, there are many ways to do this, and you should be doing them all. But for our purpose here, I will limit it to Search Engines.

A while back, doorway pages were all the rage. Everyone was scrambling to create hundreds and thousands of pages to essentially trick the search engines into leading people to their sites. It seemed unethical to me, and I figured that the engines would pick up on this and bring it to an abrupt halt. And they have. They want pages with content. So much for all those doorway pages. It was a big waste of time and effort.

Most web sites consist of several pages. Hopefully, each page covers a specific, but related topic. And, hopefully, there is already a navigational system in place, where each page links to all other pages. This is a must.

If you have a site, for example, on Internet Marketing, you already know that this subject encompasses many topics. Each of those topics deserves its own page. You might have pages on Ebook Marketing, Promotion, Ezines, Search Engines, etc.

Each page in your site is already a 'doorway.' If you optimize each of these pages as if it were a doorway page, you will get a good ranking in the Search Engines. First, make sure that each page sticks to a particular topic. Then write your meta tags accordingly.

Here are some guidelines for top placement in the Search Engines:

* Try to limit your meta keywords (preferably phrases) to 3. The worst thing you can do is have a gazillion keywords. Your relevancy will be shot to heck and you might get listed, but you will be #3,583,204. No one will find you.

* Do not use the same keywords on every page. Each page is different, so make the keywords different.

* Make sure your keywords appear in the title tag, the description tag, and all over your page, especially near the top.

* Do not list keywords that do not appear on the page. Again, Do NOT list keywords that do not appear on the page. Lists have been circulated showing the "most searched for keywords". They generally consist of words like: sex, naked, women, gay, adult, erotica etc.... Don't even go there. Do you really want people going to your site that don't give a hoot about what you have to say??? They are not interested and will not buy anything. You are wasting your time as well as theirs.

* Use keywords in comment tags, alt tags, and in header tags. You can also use a clear 1x1 pixel image and load the alt tag with keywords.

* The very first thing that appears on your page should be a statement of benefits rich in keywords, similar to your description meta tag. Some Search Engines ignore your meta tags and print the first words on your page as the description in their listing. If your navigational bar is at the top of the page, that is what will show up in their description. Not good.

* Header tags, (H1 for example) are very important. Search Engines read the header tags. Use these for paragraph headings instead of font tags, and load up the Keywords.

* Forget the bouncing flash and glitz. Yeah, they are fun to play with, but the Search Engines are not impressed. They may even be hampered by this as far as indexing your page. Frames, flash movies, CGI scripts, javascript, applets and image maps are all complete junk to a search engine spider. Not only that, this sort of thing will actually push your real content further from the top of the page, reducing the relevancy of what the spiders actually do see.

* Keep the spiders happy. Feed them lots of relevant content. This bears repeating, but I won't. :)

* Get a Domain! A top 10 listing is virtually impossible to achieve without having your own registered domain name.

There is no secret magical formula for getting a top ranking in the Search Engines. Currently there are over 5,000 places to register a web site with the number increasing daily. In reality, about 10 of these search engines will produce 90% of your search engine traffic. The larger search engines like Excite, Lycos and Alta Vista are visited millions of time a week and offer the most comprehensive types of searches for Internet surfers.

About The Author
Windsong is webmaster, editor and publisher at Marketing Resources Subscribe to Windsong's free e-zine: All About Search Engines!(tm)