SEO (search engine optimisation)
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Doorway Pages or Doorways

by Ammon Johns

Doorway pages, also called gateway pages or hook pages, are no more than any page of a site which has keywords that may be found in a search.  By entering your site from a search engine at such a page, visitors experience the page as a 'doorway' to your web site.

In SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) terms, doorways may be made especially to rank highly on a specific search engine for a specific search phrase. These are 'optimised' or 'targeted' doorway pages.

The simplest form of doorway page is the specific product pages of a website.  It is on such pages that specific product terms and brand names will tend to appear, and thus it is probable that these will be the kinds of pages found to 'match' specific searches for those products.

This happens of course because many of the best search engines match the words used for a search against the words that actually appear on the pages which are indexed in their database. Generally only a page that uses those words with some prominence will rank highly.

The first step to making the most of whatever pages you have that may act as doorways then is to make sure that the most relevant words to what the page offers are among the very first words used on the page.

These keywords should ideally appear in the document title, in the description, and within the first 200 characters of the body of your page.  Excessive repetition should be avoided, but the keywords should occur several times throughout the page, and definitely within the last paragraph or two as well as in the first.

You will not find an accurate published guide as to how many times the keywords should appear to match the programmed 'ideal' of any search engine spider.  The search engines protect this information in order to prevent abuse of their ranking system. As soon as anyone makes the mathematical formula known, the search engine personnel will change the algorithm.

What the SEO professional must do is to analyze the data for himself to discover what he can of the general trends that reveal aspects of the ranking algorithm.

By looking at the details such as the overall page length, the density of the keyword among the total text, the prominence of those keywords, etc, one can make sensible observations about what preferences a given search engine has.