Consider these statistics: Over 95% of Web users find what they are looking for by visiting top 6 search engines. Yahoo alone handled over 55 million searches and page views in December 1997. Many of these searches are for 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 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 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 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 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. There are two ways to go about creating doorways. You can either do it yourself or have someone do it for you.

If you decide to do it yourself, be prepared to invest a considerable amount of time on them - beating search engine algorithms is not an easy matter! You should also 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 site’s subject matter, you should target 10 to 50 keywords and keyword phrases. 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.

Knowing what it takes to make effective doorway pages is not hard – there are lots of good publications that now tell you exactly what search engines are looking for in a page that will rank highly. One of best guides to this is "Secrets to Achieving a Top 10 Position", a free 118 page manual that comes free with WebPosition software (see www.searchpositioning.com for details). The hard part is in actually creating these doorways! Basically, this is what it would involve:

First, you have to realize 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:

How do you do this? Look up top 20 web sites on major search engines under keywords and phrases people would find your web site. The key would be to then advertise on those web sites.

The most expensive way would be to buy ad space on those web sites. If you don't want to spend any money, you could use ten strategies below. These strategies may not apply to every web site.

1. Participate on their discussion boards. You could post questions, answer other peoples questions, and join in on conversations. Just include your signature file and link at end of your messages.

2. Ask web site owner if they would like a free ebook to giveaway to their visitors. You could have them link to your web site or include your ad in free ebook.

3. Submit content to their web site. You could write articles for their web site and include your resource box and link at end of article. If they publish it, you'll indirectly be at top of search engines.