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Carolyn's note: I often advise clients to build Doorway
Pages and Mirror Web Sites - often they don't want to spend the
additional money or simply do not grasp the concept. Perhaps this
excerpt by Internet Success Guru, Michael Campbell will help you all
understand....
ARTICLE: The Secret to Doorway Pages
"I get a lot of calls from people with generic web sites. They
wonder how they can compete in the search engines for popular
keyword phrases. They cover a wide range of topics like cars,
music, hockey, makeup, cellular accessories, even digital
cameras. They are often at their wits end, ready to give up on
ever having top search engine positioning. But all that's really
needed is an effective doorway page strategy.
Ok, I can hear you groaning and rolling your eyes, not doorway
pages again, but trust me, this really works. Keep in mind that
every page that leads to your main site is a doorway. And you
want to use these doorways to create two things: link popularity
and page reputation for your main site. It's easier to do than
you might think. All that's required is a little good old elbow
grease.
Definitions may vary but link popularity - to me - means a
combination of how many incoming links your site has and how
often those links get clicked on.
There are many other link definitions floating around out there,
and perhaps I'll address those in a future article. But for now,
lets focus on getting lots of links to your main site and
getting those links clicked on.
Set up several remote web sites, using very inexpensive or free
hosting. It's virtually everywhere. Are you taking advantage of
all the free hosting available to you? I don't mean those free
spammy hosts that make you put big advertisements and pop
ups in front of your html. (Although you can add them to the mix.)
I'm talking about quality free hosting.
Did you buy an Apple computer? Download iTools and claim your
20 Meg of space. What about your cable modem provider, mine
gives me a free web site. Plus there's my dial up provider (a back
up in case my cable modem goes down), they give away free
space as an incentive. As does my Windows PC and my CD
writer manufacturers. That's five free hosting services already.
True, many of them don't allow commercial sites but that's ok. They will allow a personal page like a biography. Then you
simply tell a little about yourself, your company, and link out
to all the wonderful web sites that you've created.
Make sure each server is in a different part of the country or
even in another country. Make five doorway pages and store
them on each hosting service. Link each of those five doorway
pages to internal pages (not the home page) on your main site. Ideally, the content or focus of doorway page, should match the
content of the internal page.
Now create a home page for each of these little five page sites
on the free hosting services. Use GRKDA, GRSEO, and the
templates in the Vault, to tune the keyword density of each home
page to attract a different major search engine technology.
Now link the each home page to their interior pages. These
interior pages on your remote sites are actually just doorway
pages in disguise. They are the ones that link to your main
site. They should be laser like in focus, with one primary
keyword and a few secondary keywords, actual search phrases
that people use while shopping the net.
So just to recap. Set up half a dozen or so remote sites. Each
home page tuned for a major engine. The home page leads to
five or six internal pages which each link out to a different
internal page on your main site. This is the final destination
where the customer can make a purchase.
By setting up several remote sites with doorway pages, you
greatly increase the amount of incoming links to your main site. By focusing doorway pages on specifics like product makes and
model numbers, you greatly increase your chances of landing in
the top of the search engines. When you're top in the search
engines you get the clicks - which is the other component of
link popularity.
If you make your mini sites low tech and content rich, you
should have no problem getting them listed in directories like
Yahoo and LookSmart. (I got site listed in Yahoo just the
other day.)
The trick is to wait until you've been listed in the directories
for a month or so, before linking them to your main site. This
ensures the spiders have time to find the mini sites. Once your
mini site has been spidered, go ahead and link your mini site's
doorway pages out to the internal pages of your main site.
If you don't want to wait a long time (two months) to start
getting results, you can add instant link popularity by buying
your way into Inktomi using their paid inclusion program at
http://positiontech.com/inktomi/.
Wait a few days to a week, for Inktomi to come and spider your
page before submitting to other engines (like Google) that give
extra points for incoming links. In fact, you may want to submit
to Google last, waiting until after you've been crawled by
several of the other major search engines.
Back to the doorway pages for a moment. Here are a couple of
other super important factors to remember. Vary the byte length
of the pages. Byte length means the size of the pages in terms
of kilobytes.
Make some pages long and wordy. Make some short. Vary where
you put the links on the pages, length and size of paragraphs,
and where the graphics are placed. Also vary the number and
destinations of links on each page.
That pretty much covers building your own link popularity. Just think, if you set up five - seven page sites, your main site
would have 35 new incoming links, from 35 different pages, spread across five domains. That's better link popularity than
90% of the web sites out there.
And if you use several of those 20 buck a year hosting companies, it'll cost you all of a 100 bucks a year for those
links. Then add in all your "Bio" style pages from your quality
free hosting services and you'll quintuple your main site's link
popularity.
That's it for using doorway pages to create
link popularity and page reputation. Until then.... get busy making pages on free or low cost hosting
and start linking them to your main site."
Michael Campbell
Dynamic Media Corporation
Michael Answer's A Reader's Doorway Question:
Question: I
have an online store that promotes CDs. You mention in the
Vault, to create five sites and put related topics on each.
Do you mean categories like musical dvds, music videos and wireless headphones.
Must I make a list of keywords for each topic and work out the density of
keywords? And what about cross linking? Do you mean linking each site together
and then linking the sites to the main store?
Answer: Yes, all those musical items are related, and would make
good doorway pages when stored on the five sites. The more targeted the pages
are, the better. Focus on a single band or singer, make a doorway page for the
artist and drive the traffic to a page featuring the artist on your main store.
Yes, you'll need to make a list of keywords, whatever you want your site to be
known for, then work out the densities for top scoring pages. But don't stress
on it too much because densities can change often.
Focus on creating one or two pages with exact densities by following the
templates in the Vault. Then make a whole bunch of pages, similar but not
exactly like the top scoring ones. They'll have a density, but you don't need to
know or stress out about what it is. Just make a volume of doorway pages and
vary the content.
Yes, you can link your sites together and to the main store as well. But how you
link them, what you say in those links, and the order in which you submit your
pages is very important.
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