Are gateway pages and doorway pages really the best way to
get high search engine rankings?
How many of you think 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 then submit to the search engines.
Many of these companies use automated programs such 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. |