One of most popular marketing concepts today is "mini-site." A mini-site is essentially a one-page sales letter, linked to an order form, specifically designed to sell a single product or service. While mini-sites are very effective sales tools, it can be a major challenge to attract search engine referrals to a mini-site.

Conventional wisdom says that you have to buy your traffic through e-zine advertising, pay-per-click, and affiliate program commissions... but that's not whole story. A high percentage of sales of my new book have been from direct search engine referrals.

In fact, you can optimize a mini-site for search engines, although it may require some real HTML coding skills to get job done.

In general, mini-sites lack three things that search engines value most: keywords, content, and linkage.

The Keyword Challenge Because a mini-site is a sales letter, choice of wording in headlines, and throughout site, is dictated by site's primary purpose - it's supposed to close sale. Somehow, a balance has to be struck between effective selling copy and keyword placement. In a moment, I'll explain how this can be done.

The Content Gap Most top-ranking sites carry significant content, optimized for a group of thematically related keywords. The structure of site itself contributes to overall search engine rankings and traffic, by reinforcing theme. A mini-site is only one page, with a sales message. Don't worry, there are several ways to bridge this gap.

The Missing Links Unfortunately, a "links" section sort of defeats purpose of a mini-site, which is designed to keep visitor in one place until they've made their decision. So, link swaps are out of question. Even affiliate programs usually don't help with link popularity because of way affiliate links work. This, too, can be overcome.

WARNING: This is a bit more complex than usual e-zine fare... you may have to read it twice to fully understand it.

Step One: Optimizing For Keywords The first obstacle is opening headline - you need it to be effective and attention-getting. The solution? If you can't change your headline, use an image instead of a regular H1 tag! With GIF or PNG compression, you should be able to bring even biggest headline in at less than 1K - you can also use your keywords in image's ALT property.

If you use an image for headline, you'll want to use Javascript to make sure your headline image preloads before rest of page - if you don't, you'll lose sales... and don't try this at all if your hosting provider isn't up to snuff - headline should load within 1 second on a typical 56K dialup connection.

One day, you hear they’re best way to get ranked in search engines. But next day, you read that they'll get you banned! Is this criticism valid?

Let's raise curtain, and expose truth about doorway pages, and how they can affect your search engine rankings.

The truth is that doorway pages, themselves, are not problem.

The *development and use* of doorway pages are what make difference between a site that gets black-balled from engines and one that’s listed at top of search results.

Getting your pages accepted by engines is as simple as making informed decisions... and using means acceptable by search engines’ current preferences.

Here are some simple guidelines you can use to stay on track with your doorway pages.

1) Content is King

The search engines are becoming more sophisticated in their ways of selecting who gets top spots. And now, more than ever, they look closely at content or body text of your web pages.

For instance, they use text filters to detect duplicate text, code or META tags. If you steal someone’s content, search engines can block YOUR web page and possibly your entire website. This is done to filter out repetitive material (and other garbage) from search results.

Probably most effective doorway pages are those containing brief articles, or other informative info, relevant to topic and keyword(s). Articles should be approximately 300-600 words in length and focus on no more than a few related keywords. Attempting to focus one page on too many keywords will dilute your efforts and diminish results.