Experience Branding" ? How to Survive as an Online Retailer

An early case of this branding method put into practice was Macy's Department Store Leisurama homes of 1963. Back then you could actually go to 7th floor of Herald Square store in New York City and see a full-blown house - completely furnished. You could buy house there - then 3 months later move in (these were built in Montauk, New York). The finished house was furnished right down to toothbrush and everything was included in one single price. This method of experience branding was so successful that, down to this day, owners of many of these houses still own towels, dishes, etc. that came with house. They enjoyed experience and wanted to preserve it.

Doorway Pages by Any Other Name

I would have thought that subject of Doorway Pages (Entry Pages, Gateway Pages, etc.) had been exhaustively explored by now, but we tend to forget that there are new users coming on internet daily, and there hasn't been much coverage on topic recently.   There are many design and development tools (free or otherwise) available for new webmaster, so almost anyone can build a website, but they face same age-old problem of trying to find ways to get their new site noticed (and longer it takes, more frantic they get). We all go through same learning curve. We read or hear about various promotion techniques. We get advice on Search Engine Optimization, Opt-in Lists, Safe Lists, E-zine advertising, and list goes on. There is a wealth of information on web, but there is probably just as much, or more, misinformation. Not only can important information change rapidly, but it is awfully easy to stumble across archived information, or a free eBook - and not realize that it is outdated. Anyway, a reader recently asked me about usefulness of Doorway Pages to increase their rankings in search engines. It will soon become obvious what my short answer would have been, but I don't normally just accept someone else's opinion without an explanation. I hope you are same way. Doorway pages were first developed as a means to create a page that was optimized for a particular search engine in order to achieve a higher ranking. Because search engines used different algorithms for ranking web sites, it had become impossible to optimize a single page to meet ranking criteria of all of them. You could get a page ranked high on one search engine and watch your rankings plummet on another. The answer? Create multiple (Doorway) pages - each optimized for a single, major search engine, and have each of them link, redirect, or forward to actual web page you wanted to promote, and then submit that page to that particular search engine - instead of actual web page your viewer will ultimately see. While it was a little extra work to create 6,7, or even a dozen or more Doorway pages - general consensus was that ranking results in targeted search engines made it all worthwhile. The problem with this... As with every good technique, tip, or trick - some overzealous (and that's being kind) "marketers" (and that's being liberal) will find a way to abuse it. Just as some people will put popular search terms in their keywords Meta Tag regardless of whether those terms have any relevance to web page being submitted, they also began spamming search engines with Doorway pages.   Now, understand that search engines gain their competitive edge by being able to deliver more relevant results to any set of search terms. It is their business purpose, their entire reason for existing. The better they are at doing this, more popular their service becomes over their competition, and more successful they will be. They will combat anyone or anything that interferes with their ability to deliver their product or service (wouldn't you?).   Doorway pages are viewed by search engines as an attempt to manipulate them and their service. How can they possibly differentiate their service from competition if they allow their "supplier" (web masters) to dictate what they will deliver to their "customer" (web surfers)? It didn't take long for major search engines to learn to identify Doorway pages, and their overwhelming response has been to: