Doorway Pages - Optimizing Website Design

Taking the responsibility to create websites means the author is usually responsible for site promotion and optimization.

One way to promote your website and drive more traffic is through the use of legal doorway pages.

In the old days a doorway page was a web page stuffed with keywords for the purpose of getting indexed at the top of search engine listings. Some authors would even go so far as to create a page that was just a list of their keywords repeated several times over and over. When a user accessed the page a redirect sent them to another page that made sense.

If you were to try this practice today in website design, you would soon be banned from the search engines.

Today search engine experts still recommend doorway pages but their definition has changed.

Doorway pages of today are just web pages filled with good content that are optimized to get good placement on the SEs. They might be pages that focus on a different set of keyword phrases than the home page.

Basic Rules for Effective Doorway Pages in Website Design

  • 1...Build pages to 250 - 500 words.

  • 2...Place your keyword phrase in title tag, content and description meta tags (for minor engines), 1rst header tag, 1rst paragraph, several times throughout the content, in hyperlinks, in alt tags of images, in comment tags, in last paragraph and bold and underline the text in the content.

  • 3...If the page doesn't sound right when you read it, you may have used the phrase too many times. Try using synonymns. Don't repeat more than 7 times in 500 words.

  • 4...Place a link on the home page that goes to the doorway page. The link should also use the keyword phrase.

  • 5...Research your keywords at wordtracker.com. Be sure you are targetting the right keywords. Don't use the free trial. Pay $7.75 to use it for 48 hours.

  • 6...Whatever type of page, always provide a good navigational structure for your users.

  • 7...For engines that place clips from the page as their description, surround the keyword phrase with information you want your potential visitors to see.