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 kind of text statistics and factors that make a page rank highly on a particular engine for a particular keyword or phrase.

A doorway is designed for search engines, to make 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 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 same time super-friendly to search engines.

For more information on Doorway pages read my article : Doorway Pages.

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 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.

What goes into making of a doorway page?

First, you have to know that ranking criteria varies from search engine to search engine. Most evaluate placement of keywords or keyword phrases on various parts of your pages based simultaneously on all these criteria:

1.Prominence of keyword searched how early in a page a keyword appears.

2. Frequency of keyword searched number of times keyword appears. Be careful about this. Simply repeating keyword will not work because grammatical structure and keyword weight also plays a role.

3. Site Popularity a few search engines consider how popular your site is when ranking.

If you don't have many links...

You've got to be concerned about this NOW. The Internet is becoming increasingly competitive, and at same time is swelling in size. Search engines are continually refining way they determine top Web site positioning, but count on this:

Link relevancy - number of sites linking to yours - will play an increasingly important role. There are three key ways you can generate links to your site:

1. Develop Your Content

If you make it worthwhile to link to your site, 'they will come'. According to Forrester Research, continually adding high-quality content accounts for up to 75% of repeat visitors to your site. Creating a resource area for people and encouraging them to link to your site will generate a certain number of links back to you.

2. Be Proactive: Ask For Links

Find sites that reach same audience you do, and ask each individual Webmaster for a link. Obviously, this will work only if you are not a direct competitor of theirs, AND you offer something of genuine value which they don't already have on their site. Carefully tailor each request you make to individual site, and indicate on which page of site you feel your link belongs.