Lesson #09 Creating Effective Doorway Pages
Written By Cyndalie

Optimizing all of the viable entry pages of your site for listing in the search engines is often not enough to cover the range of relevant keywords needed to bring sustainable amounts of traffic to your site. In fact, simply optimizing the pages of your site, especially if you use frames or Flash, does not create enough virtual real estate in the search engines to be competitive in a saturated market.

Doorway pages have been developed and used for this purpose. As of late, doorway pages have been under the gun as an unacceptable way to drive traffic to your site because they fill the search engine will “low quality” or “low content” pages. However, to remain competitive doorway pages are essential to keeping traffic coming to your web site and keeping your business alive.

In this Traffic Lounge Lesson, we will go over a simple way to create doorway pages and some basic guidelines to follow.

Developing Property

If you think about it, doorway pages are exactly what they sound like; they create more entrances into your website, therefore making it more “findable”. Imagine that your website is a building, and that building has one entrance. Not only is the entrance harder to find, it's a safety hazard, and such is the case with your web business.

Think of doorway pages as any optimized page of your site other than the primary pages. If you continuously build up property (optimized pages) around your main site the higher the chances of an entrance will be found. Not every doorway page has to be the typical “keyword, keyword, keyword – Enter Here” format. Creating a new TGP page? Optimize it for a few keyword phrases and submit it to the search engines when you are finished. Adding an adult store to your site? You got it, get the particular page listed in directories and market it as an adult store.

Things to Avoid

Doorway pages do not have to be a complex barrage of keywords and reckless copy and paste of keyword content (or stolen tags) into code. Keyword content is content in sentence format containing keywords and phrases you are trying to target. These keywords can often be searched and replaced to save time and will help to retain your keyword density. See Search Engine Overview: Key Concepts.

Your doorway pages should differ in layout styles and no two should be identical (or mirrored pages). The goal is to hit on as many different keywords and algorithms as possible, so you are ranking somewhere all the time for steady, year round traffic and flow of business. Doorway pages should not be made using auto page generators that bang out hundreds of identical pages (with different keywords) that are used by thousands of webmasters. Why? Well the engines base their algorithms on the fact that few pages meet their 100% relevance criteria. When or if too many pages meet this criterion of density or layout styles, they change the algorithm and if all your pages are alike, all your rankings will collectively drop.

Creating Pages

When sitting down to create your doorway pages follow the tips and advice provided in Optimization Factors and Optimization Tricks. You want to keep these pages light, simple in design, and effective – they entice the user to click through. Your doorway pages should contain your logo, graphic, or banner and should reflect the look and feel of your site and business. This is so the user does not feel as if he/she has been redirected to some other site or has been misled. Your doorway pages should vary in the keywords you target and density. Your doorway pages should link to the most relevant page within your site; this helps the all around relevance of the pages and of your site. Use images or graphics for redundant "Enter Here" or "Click to Continue" type text as these are often red flags telling engines that this is a doorway page. When saving your pages, name the page the primary keyword or keyword phrase (separated by understores or hyphens).

Cross Linking

Since engines like Google will not necessarily add pages unless it spiders a link on a page that is currently indexed that points to your page, make sure to link all of your doorway pages to one another and to your home page. The most effective way to cross link your pages is to hotlink a keyword (text) on your page most relevant to the target keyword on the page you are linking to. Meaning: if the doorway page I am working on is targeting “hot amateur blondes”, I want to create a text link that says “hot amateur blondes” and paste it onto all my doorway pages and main page where applicable. Always link your pages to and from one another!

Scheduling Page Creation

I find it is highly effective to create and crosslink 5-10 doorway pages at a time and submit one doorway page per day, no more than two per domain name per day, manually to the search engines. To stay within the “rules” of the search engine game and avoid the scrutiny of “spam cops”, I have also found that it is effective to not create more than 30 total doorway pages per domain name. Once this number has been reached it's time to either develop subdomain properties and “dummy" promotional sites to continue to build up your search engine real estate. Ideally you want to stay within the rules and have a continuous flow of incoming pages to rank for as many relevant keywords and phrases, and to increase the overall relevance and ranking of your primary domain name for a continuous flow of clean, incoming targeted traffic.