Search Engines Doorway Pages
Doorway Pages
The philosophy of Doorway Pages, Gateway Pages and Index Pages has changed somewhat in the last 5 years, but they are still relevant and useful to assisting search engines and visitors to your website. Particularly websites that have many products, services and key word targets, doorway pages can help get all keywords to matter, and prevent your site from participating in link SPAM.
Doorway pages are viewable web pages designed to be submitted like normal web pages to the Search Engines and Directories. They are mostly used these days to focus on a unique product, service, topic or or keyword/phrase. They are particularly helpful if your website has a large number of keyword and key phrase targets.
Index Pages e.g. index.html or index.php identify a principle page to a website, and by inserting one in a folder in a root direct, that folder can become a partitioned part of your website, or be turned into a subdomain.
Gateway Pages are virtually prehistoric now, but were keyword linked web pages that were made invisible to internet users by inserting the special meta tag "No Index, Follow". In the "olden days" when search engines were not very sophisticated yet, Gateway Pages were used to weight a website with keywords for higher ranking results.
Although no longer legitimately used, it is important that internet marketers be aware of the existence of Gateway Pages, as they are still used by unscrupulous web designers, or "link bombers" as they are commonly termed as today, to wreak havoc upon the ranking of competitor websites.
The Splash Website has been redeveloped many times over the last 15 years, it was originally our creators hobby and web design learning arena, but eventually the site paid unimaginable dividends to our marketing company. The site deliberately contains many different topics of interest, and this ongoing practise has kept our site interesting and brought in a frequent number of new visitors every day, from all over the world. Search Engines love busy websites.
With so many topics competing in their own right on our domain, it was important to partition the website into a series of keyword weighted sections. We would not be able to do this without utilising a combination of Doorway and legitimate Index Pages
As shown in the Diagram, there is a recommended linking layout of doorway pages to prevent spamming. It is helpful to begin partitioning a website by placing each individual topic into it's own folder, and then setting up a subdomain address to that folder.
e.g. http://www.telemarketing.splash.net.au
In this scenario the index page acts as a sub-home page, and all keyword hyperlinking points to the index page, to ensure that the index page is listed by Search Engines,
A good site map has a caption and brief paragraph incorporating keywords and phrases about each webpage in your website. A Sitemap Page, best named as sitemap.html, is useful for search engines indexing your site, and can be a comprehensive guide to visitors.
Caution: It is wise to only have a maximum of 100 links on this page.
Search Engines also accept sitemaps in xml, text and rss formats. There are a number of free programs in the world that will assist you automate the process of developing these types of sitemaps, some of these are listed on the marketing tools page.
Important pointers about Doorway Pages:
- Create and optimize your doorway/index pages in the same way as described in previous pages of this site.
- Ideally locate your index page in it's own folder upon your root directory.
- Name the folder using a major keyword or keyphrase (no spaces or hiphens between)
- Ideally name a doorway page using the featured keyword or short key phrase e.g. ham.html or php
- Ensure that Keyword Headline Hyperlinks <h1/h2/h3 etc> link back to your Master (Root) Index Page using the principle keywords and key phrases also located on your index page.
- Ideally create a circle of links, i.e. have doorway pages only keyword link to each other (as shown above)
- Only link back to doorway pages from the index page if your total links do not exceed 30
- Include Doorway Pages in your sitemap.
Let us now move to a more sinister part of this program, to learn about the antics of some of the more underhanded internet marketing cheats.
