How to Build Doorway/Entry Pages

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by Michael Wong

It is a fact that you cannot optimize all your web pages for a high ranking in all of the search engines. What works with Excite, won't necessarily work with Altavista.

That's why you're unlikely to find a particular web page ranked highly in one search engine, in any of the others.

So, it makes sense to create an optimized page for each of the top search engines. This are known as "Doorway" pages. They are also referred to as, "Entry", "Gateway" and "Bridge" pages.

You may think that your homepage is the best doorway page for your visitors. Maybe that is true, but it is usually too generalized to use it as a doorway page.

Doorway pages need to be optimized with a certain number of keywords, in precise places on the page, within a certain amount of body text and images.

How Do You Make A Doorway Page?

Like I said before, a doorway page must be designed with the particular search engine in mind. Some search engines will boost your pages ranking, if meta-tags are used, while others won't. Some will consider the meta-refresh tag and small text as spam, while others won't. Some will index the "alt" text in your image tags and some are case sensitive.

For a detailed list of how the different search engines rank your pages, take a look at the excellent "Search Engine Features Chart" page in the "searchenginewatch.com" Web site.

Next you need to decide what the doorway page should look like. Maybe it is a good idea to leave out your graphics menu bars at the top, side or bottom of your page.

Ideally, the page should be compact. So, if you're like me and you design long pages, design your doorway pages with a less text and images.

Then decide what keyword/s you want to target. If your Web site offers free clip-art, one of your doorway pages could concentrate on the search phrase "free clip-art".

You should construct your meta-tags by mentioning the keywords "free clip-art" a number of times.

So your meta-tags might look something like this:

<title>Free Clip-art. 1000s of free clip-art for you to download!</title>
<meta name="description" content="ABC clip-art. Download 1000s of free clip-art images - clipart on business, wildlife, office and many other subjects!">
<meta name="keywords" content="free, clip-art, clipart, clip art, free images, graphics, logos, buttons, etc....">

In the body of the page, you can include the title in a <h2> or <h3> tags. Evidence suggests that some search engines place more importance to keywords placed within the title tags.

Within the body text mention your keywords a number of times.

Also, use your keywords in your links and name your doorway page using your keywords. So, your web page could be, "free-clip-art.html".

Even if you employed all those tips, the success of doorway pages is not guaranteed. You will only find out by trial and error, in the same way that advertising is in any format. There is no magic solution.

If you decide to create a doorway page for a 3 search phrases for each of the 7 major search engines, you will need to create 21 pages in all.

When you have created your doorway pages, upload them to your server and submit that particular page to the search engines. Don't forget that you need to monitor the effectiveness of each doorway page and make minor modifications to see what effects they have.

That may sound like a lot of work. Guess what? You're right, it is! Now, you see why I haven't bothered with search engines before?