The Art of Writing "Doorway" or "Hook" Pages 

by Michael Campbell

We call them hook pages, the secret weapon that drives qualified, motivated prospects straight to your web site. They have been called doorway pages, portal pages, entry pages, and more, but they all boil down to the same thing. Hook pages are single web pages, full page ads for your web site, that are fine tuned to rank high in the search engines. 

The hook pages contain links back to your home page and internal web pages. Like the secret weapon home pages we examined in the last section, they act as a one way valve, a doorway to get users into your site using the most popular tools on the internet, the major search engines. 

Although not as effective as they once were, hook pages are still a formidable weapon, and one of the easiest to produce. For example, in one month, the cell-west.com home page got 5543 visitors from Google, 4790 visitors from AltaVista and an amazing 4140 visitors from hook pages. The site also got 2138 visitors from Yahoo, even though cell-west.com itself is not listed in Yahoo. I'll explain this one a little bit later. 

Search engines have made it a little tougher to score top results with a hook page. They've put in anti spam filters. They've added extra "findability" to home pages or reviewed sites leaving hook pages with less priority. They've added "trigger" words, words that when searched will take you into their "reviewed" directory and bury actual search engine results so far down you can't even find them. Plus many of them purge and spit out everything but a handful of pages. But all that aside there's one place where hook pages still shine. Lean a little closer and I'll whisper it in your ear... complex searches. Not simple phrases like "cell phone" but power phrases like "digital cell phone batteries", "nokia 5160 lithium battery", or "motorola startac belt clip". 

Here is the strategy. Not everyone searches the web using simple phrases, true most do, but millions of people don't. Keep the home pages tuned for generic keyword phrases. Let the hook pages handle complicated search phrases. If someone is on Yahoo and does a search for "cellular phones", there are plenty of matches. 

Try searching for something more complicated like "nokia lithium batteries" and there are no search results. The results you see are coming from Google not Yahoo. Google is the search engine Yahoo defaults to if there are no matches from the Yahoo directory. These "complex search terms" are where hook pages really shine, often placing in the top 5 results. 

If you have and online store carrying 10 major brands, each having 10 products, that's 100 hook pages. Plus we need to cover different keyword densities on the pages. Sometimes a 4.5% keyword density is just perfect, other times its 8.9%. Then we need hook pages that are search engine specific, designed to do well in one particular engine. Then we have various styles of pages ranging from short to very long and wordy. 

I generally focus on two types of hook pages, generic and targeted. Generic ones are based on multiple generic keywords were I try to have each keyword appear a certain percentage of the time. Targeted hook pages take a particular keyword phrase and are designed with one search engine in mind. When you have 80 - 100 hook pages, and believe it or not, you eventually will, at least five of them will be doing well in the search engines at any moment in time. Just concentrate on a couple of generic hook pages, gradually work to more targeted pages, and follow the guidelines for creating pages that you'll find in chapter 3. 

In order to get started, turn to the Planet Ocean newsletters. 

They often have starting percentages based on their own observations, what page length and keyword density are working best right now. If you've purchased GRKDA you can analyze the top scoring pages yourself. 

Just type a two word phrase in any search engine and you'll get the top results. Visit each one of the pages and use your browser to save the pages as html code to your hard drive. Now fire up GRKDA and type in the same two word phrase you searched on earlier. Look for keyword densities, phrase densities, where in the html code the keywords were used, plus how many words and characters make up the title, meta tags and body. 

Now don't go stealing anyone's html code. Just look at the conditions that make up a top scoring page. I personally use a two word phrase unrelated to, and less competitive than cellular when trying to determine what densities are currently effective. 

That way I can be sure I'm looking at "real" pages, not pages using search engine tricks or cloaking techniques to achieve top positions. 

The concept is simple enough. Look at top scoring pages, analyze their code using GRKDA, assemble your own page, upload it to your server, announce it to the search engines. You should have a page that comes in the top 20. That is the theory anyway. I've over simplified for the sake of example, as there are many other things that affect search engine positioning, such as link popularity and cross linking. Your results will vary. At the very least, your hook page can act as a catalyst to artificially boost the ratings of your home page because you're linking back to it. 

A key point I need to make here is NOT to tweak the page you just announced, but to use it as a template to create a new hook page. 

Keep adding new hook pages, with slightly different keyword densities and meta tags. I can't stress this enough! Just leave the old hook pages to mature and you never know when an old page will suddenly be "flavor of the month", nailing just the right title length and keyword density. When I run WebPosition to check the status of pages, I am often surprised to find hook pages I made over two years ago are suddenly popular once again. 

A good tip I can give you, is to replicate whatever is working right now. Run WebPosition to find your most effective hook pages and COPY THEM. Use your logs to find out what your best hook pages are and COPY THEM. If you're really lucky the search engine won't change what its looking for and you'll have a whole whack of pages in top positions. 

 

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: 

Michael Campbell is the CEO of  Dynamic Media Corp and The 1st Internet Marketing Store and the author of two best selling e-books, "Revenge of the MiniNet" and "Clickin' it Rich". He is also the editor  of The Internet Marketing Secrets Newsletter. To sign-up for a free copy of this popular newsletter please visit... http://www.internetmarketingsecrets.com