We read a lot about doorway pages and how they can be used to get you top search engine placement. From the email and calls that I get you would think they are pretty difficult to do. Actually they are fairly simple to do. All you really need to do is create a short, simple page that targets 1 or 2 keyword phrases.

To show you how simple it is, I created a doorway page targeting the keyword phrases "professional webpage optimization" and "webpage optimization." This page was specifically designed for Alta Vista but I considered how the Inkitomi index would treat it too since Yahoo feeds from this index.

This page probably took no more than 10 minutes to write and refine. I designed the page using the doorway page feature of Web Positon Gold software. It took another 5 minutes to publish the page and submit it to the top 10 search engines.

You would want to design a different page for each search engine since each weight the various factors differently. However, for the purpose of this "lesson" we will just look at the page designed for Alta Vista.

First we will look at how it did, then we will look at WHY it ranked as it did. All of my stats are as of when I wrote this article on August 18th, 1999. If you go to Yahoo.com and enter the keyword phrase "professional webpage optimization" and then click on webpage matches you will find this page as the first of 1,404 pages that Yahoo returns. If you click on the Alta Vista link on the bottom of the Yahoo search page it will take you to the Alta Vista returns for the same keyword search. You will see that this page comes up number 1 out of 2,400,000+ pages. Not bad ;-)

Actually, you got two different pages. You see I wanted to see how a page without metatags would rank compared to one with metatags. The page listed number 1 at Yahoo has metatags and the one listed number 1 at Alta Vista does not. The pages are identical otherwise. I believe in testing and experiment A LOT. It's the only way to really grasp what given search engines like.

I found these results interesting since Alta Vista uses metatags but listed the one of two pages I submitted that contained no metatags. The listing just contains the top few lines of text from my webpage. This shows that if you don't use metatags to "tell" AltaVista how to list you, they just grab the text.

The two pages were submitted on different days so I would also expect the other page to eventually show up in their index. These same 2 pages placed:

- 2 out of 3,000 at Yahoo for "webpage optimization"

- 2 out of 2,530 at HotBot for "webpage optimization"

- 1 and 2 at MSN for "webpage optimization"

The page also did well for several other keyword phrases at a number of search engines but I just wanted to show that it did list number 1 at Alta Vista, since that's what it was designed to do. Alta Vista is fun to work with because they get you page into the index in 1 to 2 days. You get very quick feedback on how your page did.

Now let's look at WHY it did well. The secret to this page is that it contained my target keyword phrase "webpage optimization" - in the title, in the metatags, and even in the webpage url.

The phrase is mentioned on the page a number of times but not enough where the spam filters would kick in. The phrase is also in my alt text tag that goes along with my image. To the search engines this page is clearly about webpage optimization.

A few people would look at this page and say that it looks rather plain. That's because I wanted to keep it simple. The more elements you put on a page, the harder it is to balance all of the factors that you know the search engines weigh. This page is designed to get a visitor to click on the link found at the search engine. He finds this doorway page and from there clicks deeper into your site.

Study this example and try a few of your own. In no time at all you should also be writing doorway pages that list in the top 10 or 20 at your target search engine for your target keyword phrase. This will bring in more targeted traffic for you and hopefully more business. If you would like to get a free trial version of Web Position Gold, download it at

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Willie Crawford is a well-know internet marketing consultant and writer. His website is filled with articles designed to help you succeed. Visit http://www.williecrawford.com today! This article may be freely used in your ezine or on your website as long as it is reproduced in it's entirety, to include this footnote and it is not altered.

* Copyright © 1999 Willie Crawford All Rights Reserved *

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