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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:
http://marketing-resources.com/
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