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You may have heard of
"doorway" pages. These are pages specifically built
for specific keywords and optimized for certain search engines. The
idea of a doorway page is to rank high on a search engine and
lead people into your site (the approach we take at SEP is a
different one, read about our Consultation and Development of Keyword Rich Content
here). With
Marketing Sites, we're suggesting you take a revised doorway
strategy one
step further.
Cost Effective
Online Marketing
At first, the
suggestion of having one or even several sites, each acting
as a funnel into your main site, may sound overly time
consuming and expensive, but this is actually a very cost
effective online marketing strategy. Let us explain why.
An effectively
optimized and positioned doorway site could generate
thousands of visitors a month, but let's say that one domain
allows you to bring 1000 new visitors a month to your main
site. Hosting costs for a basic corporate domain should be
no more than about $20 per month. Add in the monthly cost of
a domain name (at $35 per year, divided by 12) and you'll be
paying less than $23 per month. Of course, this doesn't
include the costs of actually constructing the site, so
let's allow another $100 per month for that (these would be
simple sites, using much of the information off your main
site and just putting a new spin on it). We're at $123
per month. That's $0.123 per visitor...say 12 and a half
cents. People willing spend 2 or 3 times that to get
visitors through banner advertising or pay-per-visitor
online marketing programs.
But Why a
Marketing Site?
Marketing Sites can
give you several advantages in your Positioning Program.
Here are some of them:
Workarounds
for Dynamic or Complicated Sites
More and more sites
today use Frames, Active Server Pages, Cold Fusion files,
Flash and other file formats. Many of these sites run on
dynamically generated pages. Or, there is a lot of java
scripting in the head tags. All of these things are great
for the look and functionality of the site, but not so
terrific for search engines. Even a series of nested tables
could decrease a page's relevancy for keywords. It doesn't
make sense to sacrifice the functionality or design of a
site just for the sake of making it more search engine
friendly. With a doorway domain, you don't have to. A
doorway domain can be relatively simple code-wise, but still
can be attractive to the eye. When greater functionality is
required (ordering online, database queries, dynamically
generated catalog pages, etc) you can link them back to your
home site.
A Site Built
Just for Search Engines
A doorway site gives
you the chance to build a site from the ground up,
specifically for search engines. File and directory names
can include keywords. The entire site can become one super
optimized online marketing tool.
A Domain to
Die For
If we're going to
optimize for a keyword, let's make sure we get those
keywords right in our domain. If we want our site to be
about wooden toys, then the domain www.wooden-toys.com
would be what we're looking for (and no, I don't know if
it's available). Why the hyphen, you ask? It seems with some
search engines that it's easier to determine that 'wooden'
and 'toys' are two different words when they're separated
with a hyphen. The use of hyphens also allow you to check
for different variations of domains that may be available.
Another Crack
at Yahoo
Again, we come to the
holy grail of search engine positioning, a listing on Yahoo.
If you're looking at optimizing for a number of keywords,
it's virtually impossible to achieve good rankings on Yahoo
for all of them with one listing. Yahoo will only search for
keywords in the title of the site and in the description.
Descriptions have to be natural sounding and if they appear
to be jammed with keywords, you can bet some eager Yahoo
editor will be only too happy to hack it down for you.
With a new doorway
site, you can do another submission and just concentrate on
the keywords the domain is optimized for. This will also
allow you to submit to different categories.
Abusers Beware
You must keep in mind that even
though you can build the most highly optimized doorway
site... it can be just as ineffective as a non
engine-friendly site unless you provide your visitors
some real, useful informational content before leading
them to your main site.
We've come across site owners with
multiple domains offering nothing for a site visitor other
than a "click here to find more information on
____" link. Sites like this will likely be
ignored eventually by the engines. As more engines are
relying on Link Popularity as part of their ranking
algorithms, sites with little or no incoming links (due to
lack of content) will have lower rankings, effectively
rendering your entire doorway domain strategy an exercise in
futility.
Instead, a use for your doorway site
could be to "introduce" visitors to your products
or services. Offer them highly relevant, useful
content and information on your doorway site. How
about listing the many features of your products or services
in point form, for example? Once they know they've
found what they're looking for...they'll be enticed to click
further in (through to your main site) to get further
details, product specs, etc.
For
more strategies on marketing your website, contact us
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