Understanding Doorway Pages and Their Role in SEO

The Concept of Doorway Pages

Doorway pages are created with specific text statistics and factors that enable them to rank highly on a particular search engine for a specific keyword or phrase. They are designed to satisfy search engine algorithms and then link to your main site, guiding your visitors there.

While a website is designed to satisfy human users, what works for humans doesn't always work for search engines. For instance, a website with numerous graphics and minimal text, or one that generates dynamic pages from a database, may not rank well on search engine results. This presents a challenge: creating web pages that are both user-friendly and search engine-friendly.

The Challenge of Multiple Search Engines

A page that ranks well on one search engine may not perform as well on another. To ensure high rankings on the top five engines (AltaVista, HotBot, Lycos, Infoseek, and Excite - Yahoo does not accept doorway pages), you may need to create five versions of each doorway page, each optimized for a specific engine.

The Anatomy of a Doorway Page

Creating a doorway page requires understanding that ranking criteria vary across search engines. Most search engines evaluate the placement of keywords or keyword phrases on various parts of your pages based on several criteria:

• Prominence of the keyword: how early in a page a keyword appears.
• Frequency of the keyword: the number of times the keyword appears. However, simply repeating the keyword won't work as grammatical structure and keyword weight also play a role.
• Site Popularity: some search engines consider your site's popularity when ranking.
• Keyword "Weight": the ratio of keywords to all other words. Each search engine has a threshold, crossing which may label your page as spam.
• Proximity of keywords: how close together the keywords are, especially when the item searched for is a phrase.
• Keyword Placement: the locations where an engine will look for the keyword, e.g., in the body, title, META tags, etc.
• Grammatical structure: some engines consider grammar in their calculations to deter spammers.
• Synonyms: some engines look for words similar in meaning to the keyword.

The ranking criteria are dynamic, using a complex algorithm that integrates all these factors in various proportions and with various maximum and minimum values.

Keyword Placement in Doorway Pages

An important aspect to consider is keyword placement. Here are the various places that search engines look for keywords:

• Keywords in the tag(s)
• Keywords in the title
• Keywords in the headlines
• Keywords in the link tags
• Keywords in the body copy
• Keywords in ALT tags
• Keywords in the meta tags

By understanding and implementing these strategies, you can create effective doorway pages that boost your website's visibility on search engines. For more information on doorway pages, you can refer to this comprehensive guide.