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.

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.