Doorway pages are definitely very effective Web promotion tools. But they are also controversial, misunderstood technically and ethically, and can sometimes do more harm than good when abused. None of us really knows 100% what best approach to all this is. I believe that sharing, discussion, and putting issues out in open are what promotes awareness, better decision-making, and progress. I am therefore inviting all readers to contribute their experiences, thoughts, fears, ethical concerns, successes, tips, and problems with doorways. We can all learn from each other about this most important and effective aspect of Web promotion. I also wish to invite you to our Web promotion discussion forum at www.searchpositioning.com.

To get discussion going, let me say something about one thing that everybody asks about doorways: is it fair and ethical to use them? I’d say yes. Doorways are not inherently good or bad, it is how they are used that is. In good use, they help people find what they are looking for. They also solve some serious weaknesses in search engines. You could, for example, have a site on parenting. But because your site may be made almost entirely of dynamically generated pages (database or CGI driven), behind a membership system, be highly graphical, of have long editorial text that scores poorly with search engines, your site will go unnoticed by search engines. It may be best site on parenting, but engines will rank it very poorly. Doorways here can give you justice you deserve. And until search engines learn to properly index dynamic content, images, pages with long text, password protected pages, and, best of all, learn to rate and weight in entire site’s content and factor it into search results, doorways are best solution for many webmasters.

David Gikandi

But title and description tags do matter. Most search engines use them as you wrote them to create listing for your page. Some do not consider them in ranking page.

Think of title as headline of an ad that draws attention to ad copy. And think of description as ad copy that compels reader to click to your site. And above all, be certain a visitor who clicks on your listing finds what was expected on page.

Back To Keywords

You may be able to do some tweaking of your pages relative to keywords. Since keyword set evolved along with your definition of your ideal customer and features, then benefits of your product, chances are some of these keywords are included on some pages. Or a minor change can bring this about.

Suppose you are working with a page upon which "fly fishing" occurs five times as an integral part of pitch. While this is not sufficient repetition for a top position on any search engine, page may rank reasonably well.

You can improve chance of a higher ranking by including phrase in your title tag and meta description tag, as close to beginning of each statement as possible. Remember title is ad headline and description is ad copy; be sure rewriting does not weaken ad. And while it may be ignored, include it first in keyword tag as well.

Try To Add Keywords To The Page

Suppose you have following sentence on page: "The secret to fly fishing is rod."

Consider adding "fly" so that it now reads, "The secret to fly fishing is fly rod."

Adding this word does not help pitch. But so long as it does not detract from it, we're good. If "fly rod" now occurs four times on page, add it to meta keyword tag. And it may be possible to slip it into description some way, but avoid forcing it. The title and description must bring a click. It's easy to clutter them up to point where they don't do job.

Other Things

If you are using heading tages, it helps if keywords for page are included in them as close to beginning of each as possible. Some have reported good success with including them in ALT tags.

While there is only a small bit of fine tuning that can be done with a well designed site, it's worth effort to do so. For even a small gain can improve ranking substantially.

What Matters Most

The performance of site is key. Rankings on search engines is way down on priority list compared to site performance.

Only when site is up and doing job, is it appropriate to consider generating more hits. As suggested, content pages work. And there are those who can generate hits for you. Advertising works, but takes some time to master. Link swaps are very effective, and often overlooked.

There is literally no end to what can be done to generate more hits. But until site performance is maximized, more hits mean next to nothing.