You can attempt to fine tune your main page, but since each search engine use different criteria to define a highly relevant page, you'll never be able tune your page for high rankings on all search engines. Also, doorway pages do better when you keep the text focused to a specific topic with a precise number of keywords or keyword phrases used in precise places within that page. Your home page needs to be more general and attractive to your visitors.

How to Recognize a Doorway Page

If they're done correctly, visitors won't notice that the page they are lookin at is a doorway page. But here are some things to look for that could indicate a doorway page :

• The page appears high in the search engine listings.
• A particular word or phrase is repeated in the title using different capitalizations.
• A particular word or phrase appears over and over agian in the text of the page.
• A page with only a few words that includes a link like: "To learn more about ... click here."
• The page has just a single hyperlink or linked graphic that takes you to another page.

The Ideal Doorway Page

Ideally, a doorway page should be informational to the visitor while at the same time pointing him on to the main pages of the site. And it should have the same look and feel as the rest of the site.

How to Make a Doorway Page

Doorway pages are used to help place your web site as high as possible in the search engine listings. They are used to create a very high percentage of key phrases to total words. The most important key phrase must be in the title, the heading, the description, the keyword list and in short, complete sentences in the text, comments lines, "alt" tags and <input> tags. Each sentence should be slightly different than all other sentences.

Do not put a long list of keywords in the description or the keyword meta tag. In fact, do not use key words at all. Use key phrases consisting of two or three words. And use only one or two key phrases on each doorway page.

If you can figure out how to use at least part of the key phrase in the page name [such as "doorway.html"] that is even better.

It is better to create many doorway pages, rather than try to include many key word phrases on a single doorway page. You should create dozens of different doorway pages, one for each important key phrase for each of the major search engines. Just be sure that each doorway page looks and reads differently than the others.

The best doorway pages will include an <H1> tag with the key phrase, and one or two subtitle tags containing other key phrases, one or two very small graphics with key phrases in the "alt" tags, about 25 - 100 words of text where the key phrases are repeated three or four times in different ways [always in complete sentences and each sentence different], both comment tags and <input> tags, and one or two hyperlinks.

No frames. No banners. No JavaScript. No Java. No image maps. No embedded sounds. No background images. No counters. No words written in the same or similar color as the background. Do not make the doorway page automatically change to the real page (i.e. no "refresh" tag).

Your doorway page should not be larger than 12kb including the graphics. Many are less than 8kb.

A Plan for Doorway Page Deployment

You will probably need more than just a single doorway page. You will most likely want to make several sets of doorway pages. The most important search tool is Yahoo, but it isn't technically a search engine that uses algorithms to rank pages. Yahoo depends upon human editors to classify sites and edit descriptions. So a doorway page for Yahoo isn't necessary and not recommended.

The actual search engines that are most important are (1) Excite/WebCrawler, (2) Infoseek, (3) Lycos, (4) HotBot (Inktomi), (5) AltaVista, and (6) Northern Light. Ideally, you need one gateway page for each of these six search engines for each keyword or keyword phrase that a visitor might use to find your site. If you anticipate visitors finding your site from one of five different keywords/phrases, then you'll need :

6 search engines X 5 keywords/phrases = 30 doorway pages

It's a good idea to start with the most commonly used keywords/phrases first. Also, you might target the search engines you deem most important and work on those first.

THE AUTOMATED SOLUTION

The Doorway Page Manager is the webmaster's power tool for the automatic generation of doorway pages. You'll be able to create hundreds of high ranking doorway pages for the search engines!

LONGTERM MANAGEMENT

Once you've got your doorway pages created, use a tool like The Search Engines Solution to manage them for you! The Search Engines Solution is an application that you run from your server that knows all about the search engines and handles all the duties required to successfully manage the submissions of your doorway pages. It also tracks your website's position in the major search engines daily and acts accordingly automatically!