How many of you
think that the best and/or only way to get top placements on the
search engines is to create gateway pages (aka doorway pages or
bridge pages)? If you raised your hand, you are certainly not
alone, but you are also mistaken!
If you check
out most search engine positioning companies' Web sites, you
will find that most of them promise to get you high rankings by
creating gateway pages for your site. These are pages that the
positioning companies create independently of your current
pages, which they load with keyword phrases and then submit to
the search engines.
Many of these
companies use such automated programs as
WebPosition Gold (WPG) which features a template
that the company fills in with the "proper" amount of keywords
and other text. The program's Page Generator function then
generates a page that supposedly will rank high for a particular
engine.
These
positioning companies will even go to the trouble to create
different gateway pages for each search engine, using the WPG
Page Critic function. This tool tells Webmasters what keyword
density each engine supposedly wants to see (based on past
results), and how many times you should put particular keyword
phrases into the text and meta tags of the gateway pages.
Worth the
Effort?
Sounds like a
lot of unnecessary trouble, if you ask me. Consider this: Each
and every search engine wants to see the same thing — Web sites
that are filled with good, useful content. All engines base
their ranking
algorithms on this.
For certain,
there are slight variations in the number of times a keyword
should appear and/or how many words
should be on a page, as WPG's Page Critic tells us.
But, generally speaking, these numbers are not going to make or
break your ranking.
If I paid
attention to these automated programs, I'm sure I'd find out
that most of my clients' sites have an "incorrect" keyword
density for specific engines. The program would tell me that
certain pages have too many keywords, and that others don't have
enough. My answer to that is: hogwash!
In reality,
these pages rank high for numerous keyword phrases regardless of
the "proper" keyword density, because they are filled
with great content.
If you already
have a Web site, and it's more than one page, then you have your
own built-in, natural gateway pages. Each and every page of your
current site is a doorway to the rest of your site.
To be sure,
there are sometimes technical reasons why each page of a site
cannot be a gateway. However, there's no excuse for having your
main page be so technically challenged that the search engines
can't find it and read it.
With your main
page as your jumping-off place, you simply create other
informative (static
HTML) pages that link from the main page to the
rest of the site. These are not gateway pages in the original
sense of the word, because you're linking to them from your main
page, and you actually want people to visit them. These pages
should give useful information about your site, your business,
and the people who run it; and, of course, these pages should be
easy to navigate.
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Continued...
A Costly
Lesson
Creating
gateway pages that are not linked to the rest of your site and
don't provide important information about your site is not
necessary, and may even harm your site's rankings.
The main thing
typical gateway pages do is create clutter in the engines. What?
A search engine optimization specialist who is worried about
cluttering the engines? You bet!
I have to use
the engines as much as the next person, and I'm as frustrated by
the lack of good content and by hard-to-find Web sites as
everyone else is. There's no way that I want to contribute to
that, and for this reason, I have always advocated against using
gateway pages.
I'm
probably one of the few search engine placement experts who are
extremely happy that many search engines, such as
AltaVista, are starting
to take a stand against gateway pages by not allowing them and
by deleting them from their databases. Believe it or not, this
development has put a number of search engine placement
companies suddenly out of business. However, if they were doing
it "the right way" to begin with or were willing to learn the
right way, they'd still have a lucrative business.
Repeating My
Mantra ... Again!
Those who know
me and my other articles on this subject know my mantra, which
always bears repeating:
If your site
has content that naturally uses your relevant keyword phrases,
and you follow simple guidelines on how to create your titles
and
meta tags, your Web site will rank high.
No gateway
pages necessary. No separate pages for separate engines. No
keyword density percentage numbers to give you a headache. (They
always give me one!) In the simplest terms possible: You do not
need to reinvent the wheel! Use your current site's pages to the
greatest advantage, and high rankings will come to you on a
silver platter!
I'm sure some
of you are shaking your heads and asking, "What if my site
doesn't have much useful content or doesn't use my keyword
phrases effectively? Shouldn't I create gateway pages that do
this?"
The answer to
this is quite simple. Fix your site! If your site doesn't have
useful content that naturally utilizes the keyword phrases for
which you should be ranking high, then it's missing the
essential elements of a good Web site and needs to be altered
accordingly. Not only is this a solid search engine strategy,
but it's also important for getting people to click further into
your site and ideally, for making some sales.
When it comes
to providing good content for high rankings, you should focus
mostly on your main page. However, all major inside pages should
also be edited as necessary to ensure that each key area of your
business is well represented in the search engines. If you
design your Web pages with these things in mind, high rankings
will be sure to follow.
The views of our authors don' t necessarily
reflect the views and policies of this company or its
advertisers.
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