I get a lot of calls from people with generic web sites. They wonder how they can compete in the search engines for popular keyword phrases. They cover a wide range of topics like cars, music, hockey, makeup, cellular accessories, even digital cameras. They are often at their wits end, ready to give up on ever having top search engine positioning. But all that's really needed is an effective doorway page strategy.
Ok, I can hear you groaning and rolling your eyes, not doorway pages again, but trust me, this really works. Keep in mind that every page that leads to your main site is a doorway. And you want to use these doorways to create two things: link popularity and page reputation for your main site. It's easier to do than you might think. All that's required is a little good old elbow grease.
In the first part of this article I'll cover link popularity. In the next issue of this newsletter. I'll take a detailed look at page reputation and how you can control what your pages are known for. Ok, on with the show....
Definitions may vary but link popularity - to me - means a combination of how many incoming links your site has and how often those links get clicked on.
There are many other link definitions floating around out there, and perhaps I'll address those in a future article. But for now, lets focus on getting lots of links to your main site and getting those links clicked on.
Set up several remote web sites, using very inexpensive or free hosting. It's virtually everywhere. Are you taking advantage of all the free hosting available to you? I don't mean those free spammy hosts that make you put big advertisements and pop ups in front of your html. (Although you can add them to the mix.) I'm talking about quality free hosting.
Did you buy an Apple computer? Download iTools and claim your 20 Meg of space. What about your cable modem provider, mine gives me a free web site. Plus there's my dial up provider (a back up in case my cable modem goes down), they give away free space as an incentive. As does my Windows PC and my CD writer manufacturers. That's five free hosting services already.
True, many of them don't allow commercial sites but that's ok. They will allow a personal page like a biography. Then you simply tell a little about yourself, your company, and link out to all the wonderful web sites that you've created.
Make sure each server is in a different part of the country or even in another country. Make five doorway pages and store them on each hosting service. Link each of those five doorway pages to internal pages (not the home page) on your main site. Ideally, the content or focus of doorway page, should match the content of the internal page.
Now create a home page for each of these little five page sites on the free hosting services. Use GRKDA, GRSEO, and the templates in the Vault, to tune the keyword density of each home page to attract a different major search engine technology.
Now link the each home page to their interior pages. These interior pages on your remote sites are actually just doorway pages in disguise. They are the ones that link to your main site. They should be laser like in focus, with one primary keyword and a few secondary keywords, actual search phrases that people use while shopping the net.
So just to recap. Set up half a dozen or so remote sites. Each home page tuned for a major engine. The home page leads to five or six internal pages which each link out to a different internal page on your main site. This is the final destination where the customer can make a purchase.
By setting up several remote sites with doorway pages, you greatly increase the amount of incoming links to your main site. By focusing doorway pages on specifics like product makes and model numbers, you greatly increase your chances of landing in the top of the search engines. When you're top in the search engines you get the clicks - which is the other component of link popularity.
If you make your mini sites low tech and content rich, you should have no problem getting them listed in directories like Yahoo and LookSmart. Just follow the advice in my book Nothing But 'Net, it still works. (I got site listed in Yahoo just the other day.)
The trick is to wait until you've been listed in the directories for a month or so, before linking them to your main site. This ensures the spiders have time to find the mini sites. Once your mini site has been spidered, go ahead and link your mini site's doorway pages out to the internal pages of your main site.
If you don't want to wait a long time (two months) to start getting results, you can add instant link popularity by buying your way into Inktomi using their paid inclusion program at
http://positiontech.com/inktomi/.
Wait a few days to a week, for Inktomi to come and spider your page before submitting to other engines (like Google) that give extra points for incoming links. In fact, you may want to submit to Google last, waiting until after you've been crawled by several of the other major search engines.
Back to the doorway pages for a moment. Here are a couple of other super important factors to remember. Vary the byte length of the pages. Byte length means the size of the pages in terms of kilobytes.
Make some pages long and wordy. Make some short. Vary where you put the links on the pages, length and size of paragraphs, and where the graphics are placed. Also vary the number and destinations of links on each page.
That pretty much covers building your own link popularity. Just think, if you set up five - seven page sites, your main site would have 35 new incoming links, from 35 different pages, spread across five domains. That's better link popularity than 90% of the web sites out there.
And if you use several of those 20 buck a year hosting companies, it'll cost you all of a 100 bucks a year for those links. Then add in all your "Bio" style pages from your quality free hosting services and you'll quintuple your main site's link popularity.
That's it for the first half of using doorway pages to create link popularity and page reputation. In the next issue I'll show you how to get your doorway pages listed in the top of the search engines and get your main site known for - and placed for - generic phrases at the same time.
Until then.... get busy making pages on free or low cost hosting and start linking them to your main site.
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.
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