Search Engine Optimisation & Doorway Pages

Doorway pages are web pages which are specifically optimised to attain the highest possible search engine ranking for a particular keyword or key-phrase. Generally speaking, a page won't rank highly unless it contains the keywords in the right places and quantities.

It's difficult to create pages which rank well for a number of different keywords. On the whole a page is more likely to rank highly if it is targeted at a single key phrase. For example the Create Websites Free doorway page is designed to rank highly for the keywords/phrase 'create websites'.

Ideally, the search engines would like to present their users with a list of the most relevant information to the keywords entered. They prefer to find content-rich real pages and doorway pages can be a bit of an irritation to them. As a webmaster though, it can be difficult to create real, useful pages which cover all your keywords.

For example - the course teaches all you need to know to create websites from scratch in 10 weeks. It's easy enough to create an index page which ranks well for 'create websites' and a info page which maybe ranks well for 'build websites', but beyond that there not many more pages to use. Either visitors apply for the course, or they don't...

The content of the course itself would probably rank quite highly for all manner of keywords, but because it's only available to members, it's not accessible to the search engine spiders, we have to find another way of letting potential customers know we're here!

Many websites face a similar situation, and doorway pages can be a good solution...

How do search engines rank web pages?

The ranking of a web page by it's keywords is calculated by the search engine according to a set of criteria it is programmed with. The basic rules are explained in the table below, but the exact implementation of these rules can be quite long and exacting, and each engine is different. They usually explain somewhere on their site roughly what their criteria are, and more details are available from the resources listed later.

Optimising your web pages will not in itself ensure a high ranking as the most influential engines also consider how many links to your site there are from popular sites (i.e. those which have a lot of links to them).

In order to come to a ranking, each search engine assesses and weights different 'areas' of a webpage differently:

How do you optimise web pages?

Optimising a page can be thought of as creating a page which is 'Search Engine Friendly'. You can use (educated) trial and error - create your pages, submit them and see what happens, or you can use a software tool like WebPosition Gold. A lot of people use it, I've tried it, and there's a section dedicated to it below.

Because of the differences between them, it's often considered necessary to have a unique doorway page for each keyword / search engine combination. After analysing the pages listed below with WebPosition Gold's 'Page Critic', however, it seems that once you have the basics right, any differences are minor...

The Page Critic gives suggestions on how to improve a page's ranking for a particular search engine. For example: 'A keyword prominence of at least 39% is suggested for the Body Text area. Your prominence is 28.8% right now so you might consider increasing your prominence in the Body Text.'

From the reports it generated, it seemed unnecessary to create a page for each engine when it was a struggle to exactly match it's ideals while keeping the page functional. Some keyword prominence goals for Google (45%) were actually too stringent to meet, so I settled for lower values (30%).

TIP: We're not aiming for the number one spot in all the engines for our keywords. I feel that appearing in the first page of results is good enough. You have to decide what level of ranking is good enough for you. The law of diminishing returns dictates that you may never get the top spot!

With this in mind, I have created one page for each keyword. Each page attempts to be a good compromise between providing what all the engines want, and being attractive and functional.

How To Create Doorway Pages

The creation of doorway pages is a balancing act between providing pages which conform to a fairly strict set of criteria, and actually contain real content. It's fairly easy to create a page which would theoretically rank highly, but difficult to make it attractive and functional too. When your visitors arrive at the doorway page, it needs to be interesting and attractive enough to entice them into your site.

Although it would be easy to create a 'template' page which gave the search engine what it wanted, and then to copy that file and just change the keywords within it, some engines consider this to be a form of spam, and may refuse to list a site with pages like this.

Before you do create any new pages - you should see if you can just optimise the existing pages so they match all the different keywords your aiming for. If you do need to create additional pages just for the search engines, you can do it two ways:

• You can use a 'doorway page generator' to create your pages for you, but beware they may well fall into the 'spam' category unless you subsequently edit them and make them unique. You can find all kinds of great free software including doorway/gateway page generators at Nonags.
  
  
• You can create your doorway pages yourself. This isn't that hard and once you have your template you can modify it for each keyword / engine combination. Do ensure you add unique, useful info to each page.

UseIt site referral statistics show that there are just three main players in the search engine wars these days. Yahoo, Google and Inktomi. It's worth focussing attention here because this is where most of your traffic will come from.

The only way to really tell how well optimised any given page is - is to wait until it's been spidered, and then check it's ranking. Google re-indexes the (entire!) web every month.

Resources

There are some great online resources available to webmasters to help with SEO:

• Here's an excellent tutorial from WebMonkey on how to optimise your pages for free.
  
  
• SearchEngineWatch.com has been reporting on them since 1995 and has some great advice. Some websites are like national institutions, this is one of them!
  
  
• Search Engines a general article from webreference.com on search engines
  
  
• A number of sites offer to check your site's ranking on the major engines for free. Most use a script that hypermart.net give away from their site (as a marketing tool to pick up leads!). If you'd rather not give your email address try Keysub.com.
  
  
• Meta Medic From northernwebs.com will provide basic checking of your meta tags.
  
  

WebPostion Gold

WebPosition Gold is a very popular program for managing a webmaster's interaction with the search engines. It can take a lot of the work out of assessing your current ranking, and can take a lot of guesswork out of how to improve it.

INFO: WebPosition has it's detractors... It could certainly be argued that they encourage an obsession with rankings, and that the doorway pages it generates are 'spammy'... FirstPlace Software, it's creators, are currently recommending that, in order to improve your rankings, you should buy additional domains with your keywords in them and get them to redirect to your main website. This is fairly crap advice (IMHO). People hate trickery and redirections. This sort of marketing tactic could well put customers off.

WPG has some useful features, and most webmasters consider buying it at some point. It has good features and it's up to you, but my recommendation is to try the trial version and let it show you where you're making any mistakes and learn from it. Once you understand the principles of creating SE Friendly Pages, you can decide for yourself whether you need the tools it offers.


WPG2 contains the following modules:

• Reporter - queries the search engines for your site and keywords and generates reports on what it finds, where your site ranks, where your competitors are etc... This is a useful time saving tool for finding out how your site is currently placed. The reports are well presented and are genuinely helpful.
  
  Apart from AgentWebRanking (see below) there's no other tool I have found which does this quite as well.
  
  
• Page Generator - creates doorway pages according to engine-specific criteria. Not necessary for the experienced coder - it's just as easy to create your own pages.
  
  
• Page Critic - analyses and reports on each page's properties and suggests way to improve it's ranking. This is possibly the most useful tool in the box. It will tell you whether you need more or less keywords in each area, and more or less words. It will point out any possible problems that might adversely affect your ranking.
  
  
• Upload manager - to FTP your pages to your webhost.
  
  
• Submitter - to submit your website to it's (huge) database of search engines. It only really matters if you're listed in the 'big three', and you might as well do that yourself.
  
  
• Traffic analyser - tracks what keywords were used to find which pages. This is a separate subscription based service.
  
  Note, if you can run perl scripts on your website - DailyStats is a great free script which analyses your weblogs and can tell you where your visitor come from, what keywords they typed to find you etc.
  
  
• Scheduler - so you can run Reporter late at night when the engines don't mind the extra traffic so much.

It's certainly not cheap at $149, but it does have some very useful elements and it's packed with information. I always think that whenever you consider pricing, it's important to get it in context: about £100 will get you 2 column centimeters in a UK national daily tabloid!

Visit the Webposition.com Home Page or Download Page. Webposition doesn't have much competition, but here are a couple:

• Sharewarist. A complete website submission service.
• AgentWebRanking.com - this is a rankings analyser only.

Example - The Doorway Pages

In order to meet all the criteria the search engines set, while providing functional web pages, we've made the doorway pages a feature of the site. Rather than trying to hide them - they are clearly marked and linked to. Also, each page has some unique text in it - in the form of 'search engine tips'.

As you can see, the doorway pages are presented in the form of this free tutorial / example. Visitors can visit any of the pages via this page - the list of doorway pages.

I hope this find this free tutorial useful.

Feedback is greatly appreciated.