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There is a pervasive myth
among web site owners that simply submitting your web site to
hundreds of search engines will increase traffic to your site.
Another myth is that simply inserting META tags in your Web pages
will also increase your traffic. Both are just not true. META tags
and submitting are recommended, but by themselves these steps will
not get you anywhere. And for many sites, none of the other
traditional online marketing tactics work is feasible, practical,
or affordable.
So what works? Search Engine Positioning that is by far your best
and most affordable bet.
Consider these statistics: Over 95% of Web users find what they
are looking for by visiting the top 6 search engines. Many of
these searches are for the products and services that you deal in,
guaranteed! Everybody knows that even a few good positions on even
one or two important keywords or phrases can drive thousands or
hundreds of thousands of quality visitor traffic to a Web site per
day. Research has shown that people hardly ever go past the top 30
search results for any one search. The top 10 results receive 78%
more traffic than those in position 11 to 30 do. The top 30
results get over 90% of the search traffic. This alone explains
why some sites do so well and others so disappointingly, and why
it is so critical to be ranked highly.
So how do you position your web site at the top of search engine
results? Use doorway pages. Doorway pages, also known as entry or
bridge pages, are Web pages designed specifically to rank highly
on the unique ranking algorithms of each search engine. The two
best things about using doorway pages is that they cost far less
than other promotional tools such as banner ads, and they work
better when properly designed.
To put it simple, a doorway page is created using the kind of text
statistics and factors that make a page rank highly on a
particular engine for a particular keyword or phrase. As you can
imagine, figuring out and then creating hundreds or even just one
doorway page that is 'attractive' to a search engine is a mind
intensive and time consuming matter.
A doorway is designed for the search engines, to make the search
engines "happy". The doorway page then links to your main site and
takes your visitors there. A web site is designed for people, to
make people "happy", to fill a need, make money, whatever.
However, what is good for people is not always good for the search
engine. If, for example, you have a web site that has a lot of
graphics and hardly any text, or one that runs on a database and
creates dynamically generated pages, or one that is in a highly
competitive area, or even one that deals with a wide variety of
general topics, chances are that your pages will rank very poorly
on search engine rankings.
This creates a serious dilemma: how to make web pages that are
both pleasing, useful, and logical to humans, and at the same time
super-friendly to search engines.
Doorway pages help you solve these troubling dilemmas. You can
keep your current web site as it is and create dozens of doorway
pages, each optimized to rank well for a different keyword in a
different engine. Typically, when targeting 10 keywords, across 5
search engines, you will end up with 50 pages pointing to your
home page or other section on your site. Do not worry as this is
not unusual, and search engines will not penalize you as long as
your doorway pages are professional and honest, and so is your
submission. You will want your Web site to be found under several
keywords that your prospects are likely to search by. For this
reason, you will want to create separate pages that emphasize each
of those keywords/phrases and rank well for each search engine. On
average, to cover all possibilities, you need to make doorways for
about 50 keywords or phrases related to your product or service,
for each of the top search engines. That is extremely powerful
online marketing!
So you should be prepared to make a number of doorway pages. You
must make one doorway page per keyword or keyword phrase that you
want to be positioned well in. For best results, depending on your
sites subject matter, you should target at least 50 keywords and
keyword phrases related to your site's content or subject. That
will cover you well on just about any combination of words that
someone may use when querying a search engine for the kind of
products and services that you deal in.
Usually, a page that ranks well on one engine may not rank well on
other engines. Assuming that you want to make sure that you are
ranked highly on the five top engines (AltaVista, HotBot, Lycos,
Infoseek and Excite Yahoo does not accept doorway pages), you have
to make five versions of each doorway page, each optimized for a
particular engine.
We all know it and we all do it. Whenever the typical web user
needs to find something on the web, he or she will almost always
instinctively go to one of the top search engines and run a
search. Then, he or she will have a look at the first 30 search
results returned (usually the first three pages of results),
hardly ever looking beyond that.
If nothing looks appealing, they will run another search using a
variation of the keywords they used on the first search. Again,
they will look at the first 30 results. If they still find nothing
of interest, they may switch to a different search engine and
repeat the process or they re-word their search. This, believe it
or not, is the typical web navigation behavior of at least 86% of
the 110 million all web users out there. The question is, does
your web site capitalize on this behavior?
If the answer is yes for you, then no matter what a user searches
for that has any relation at all to your products, they should
find you even if they hadn't thought of finding you! That
translates to a very high amount of daily traffic to your site.
Basically, there are 6 major search engines today -Google, MSN,
AltaVista, Excite, Infoseek, Lycos, HotBot, and Northern Light.
Yahoo is a directory so this technique will not work with it. What
you need to do is figure out what kind of pages rank well with
each of these engines. Search engines use a mathematical formula
to rank all the pages in their index. It is hard, but not
impossible to come really close to knowing exactly what kind of a
page will rank well on a particular engine.
Basically, the text statistics on a page are what are considered
most by the engine's ranking formulas. For each keyword or phrase
it is necessary to create a web page that focuses on just that one
keyword or phrase and ranks it highly on a particular engine.
Because each engine ranks pages differently, it is necessary to
create a different page optimized for each engine. No one web page
can ever rank at the top on all search engines for any one
keyword, let alone multiple keywords. You will want your Web site
to be found under several keywords that your prospects are likely
to be querying in any of the top search engines. For this reason,
you will want to create separate pages that emphasize each of
those keywords/phrases and rank well for each search engine.
You can create dozens of doorway pages, each optimized to rank
well for a different keyword in a different engine. Typically,
when targeting 10 keywords, across 5 search engines, you end up
with 50 pages pointing to your home page or other section on your
site. Do not worry, this is not unusual and search engines will
not penalize you as long as your doorway pages are professional
and honest, and so is your submission - and we will take care of
that for you! Ideally, you will want to have about 50 keywords and
phrases related to your web site.
Stop and think about this strategy for a second. You have a list
of virtually every phrase that someone interested in your products
and other related products can ever use in a search. Then, you
have pages that make sure they rank highly for all those searches.
No matter what people search for that has any relation to your
products, they will find you even if they had not thought of
finding you! Do you now see how much qualified traffic you can
get? It is amazing!
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