You may have heard of "doorway" pages. These are pages specifically built for specific keywords and optimized for search engines. The idea of a doorway page is to rank high on a search engine and lead people into your site...hence the name doorway (more on doorway pages here). With Doorway Sites, we're suggesting you take this 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 Doorway Site?

Doorway Sites can give you several advantages in your Positioning Program. Here are some of them:

Work arounds 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.