* Plural Form of Keywords When a user performs a search, it's unlikely that they will enter a search term that exactly matches keywords you selected for your site. In some cases, user will enter singular form of a keyword and in others, they may enter plural form. It's essential to capture both forms of a keyword to maximize your exposure!

* Repeat Important Keywords In days of old, we could repeat a keyword numerous times to increase relevancy of a site in a search engine. This repetition allowed sites to be placed higher in search engine's list so that user would see that site first. Today, search engines filter out those sites that over-repeat keywords. It's best to repeat most important keywords no more than twice to increase your relevancy without being eliminated.

* Diversify Keyword Meanings Assume that every user has a different vocabulary--some users say "book" while others may say "publication" or "document." Each word refers to same thing, however, unless your keywords are properly selected, you may only get one-third of your potential hits! When devising your keyword scheme, take into account different forms of a given keyword. Create keywords important to your site in such a way that, regardless of search terms used by a user, your site will appear in results list.

* Keyword Variations Consider fact that users will not enter keywords into a search engine same way every time. For instance, some users may enter "real time software" while others may enter "real-time software" or "realtime software." Think about keyword variations to ensure capture of as many users as possible. Also, consider common misspellings of keywords. I know many intelligent individuals who tend to misspell certain words because of phonetic spelling of word---consider "eves" and "eaves." If a user consistently misspells such a word and you happen to sell plant hangers for under eaves, you might lose potential clients.

* Keyword Combinations and Phrases Some search engines will only take first 255 characters of a keyword list, while others accept a nearly unlimited list of keywords. The problem is that you must target 255-character limitation to be accepted by as many search engines as possible. One method to accommodate keyword list limitation is to use phrases that best describe page. For instance, I could use "ebook marketing" as a phrase that could be found with several combinations of search topics in a search engine. Another method is to ensure that most relevant keywords are located at front of keyword list---even with a 255-character limitation, most important keywords are accepted.

--- Keyword Selection ---

Your objective is to attract as many relevant visits to your site as possible. With that in mind, you will have to select keywords that are commonly used by users and that are relevant to your site.

You can easily attract users by entering such keywords as "naked women, adult, sex, ..." into your keyword list. Since these are some of most searched-for keywords, I can guarantee that your site will get hits. Do you think that someone searching for pornography is going to spend very much time on your page? The problem here is that you will be attracting people who won't provide a relevant hit to your site. This tactic wastes bandwidth, time, and money.

--- Developing Keyword Lists ---

Using information we've reviewed, let's look at creating a keyword list for a page. This is actually a more difficult task then creating page itself since you must determine best keywords that describe your page. To begin this task, let's ask ourselves: "how would people begin to search for a site like mine?"

Immediately, you could come up with about three-dozen keywords to place in a keyword list, however, many of keywords that you think are relevant may turn out to be useless. Think about how you perform searches for certain information and apply that experience to selection of keywords for your page. You'll find that time taken to create a good keyword list will be most beneficial.

The best way to weed out useless keywords is to use steps outlined in following list. These steps are proven and have worked on several sites I've marketed.

* Create an exhaustive list of words that describe your site. * Review and eliminate words that are least descriptive or redundant. * Create plural versions of words without altering their form. * Consider and note misspelling variations. * Combine words into phases. * Eliminate duplicate phrases. * Eliminate phrases with words duplicated in other phrases. * Check for other words or phrases that can diversify list. * Create a comma-delimited list of all phrases and remaining words. * Move and order most relevant words to front of list. * Duplicate four more important words and phrases twice. * Ask an associate to review words and phrases. * Ask an associate to edit list based on their search preferences. * Clean up and limit list to 255 characters. * Perform searches using your keywords to locate other relevant sites. * Go to these sites to see how they created their keyword list.

Search engines don't rank isolated pages very well, if at all, so various pages of a well constructed Doorway Domain will all be interlinked with one another. Neither should they be mere clones: duplicate content on any given web site will usually be penalized.

But if, as I claimed above, human visitors don't ever get to see them, how are they supposed to boost your sales? The answer to this is redirection: surfers hitting your Doorway Domain's well positioned link on an engine's search results list will simply be forwarded to corresponding page on your main site.

"Hey," you may groan now, "hold it! Haven't I read all over place that search engines take a very dim view of redirects and may actually ban sites from their indices if detected? So what are you trying to propose here - kamikaze optimization?"

You read right: search engines do indeed penalize web sites for redirection! However, there's a fairly easy, well established way out of this, and it goes under various names ranging from "Cloaking" through "IP Delivery" to "Stealth Technology", and others more.

Note that I said it is human visitors who will be redirected, not search engine spiders. The latter will be served with their optimized "fodder" pages from Doorway Domain itself and will never know difference.

There are various technical methods to achieve this. You can employ specialized software which will determine automatically whether a site hit is generated by a search engine spider or a human visitor. If you have administrator rights on your system (most people haven't, but if you're running your own dedicated server this is normally a given), you can tweak your configuration to achieve same effect, etc.

So you may think of a Doorway Domain as a "cloaked mini-site" fronting for your home page without annoying visitors with that 'ol "Click here to enter" spiel. Remember that many studies indicate that you have only about 8-15 seconds to capture your visitors' attention if you want them to actually stay on your site. If in doubt, check your server's traffic logs! You shouldn't make life more difficult for your visitors than absolutely necessary - it's uncourteous, and it doesn't particularly motivate buyers either!

The technical fineries of cloaking are, unfortunately, beyond scope of this introductory article, but there's a lot of fine material around which will help you get started if you're interested.

A detailed tutorial on DOs and DONTs of cloaking can be found on our site at: < http://fantomaster.com/fafaqcloak1.html > There's also a guided tour on cloaking available here (JavaScript enabled browser required): < http://fantomaster.com/fasmbgt0.html >

Note that cloaking is not without its risks! The tutorial mentioned above will explain this in more detail.)

While these risks are widely overrated, they do indeed exist, so you should know exactly what you're doing before you actually go for it. However, once you have become familiar with technology and seen its fantastic ranking results, you'll hardly settle for less again!