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April 2002 Search Engine Tips
Side Doors Use Keyword Side Doors
A "side door" (aka splash page, gateway, and doorway) page is tuned to a
specific search engine in an effort to get you a high ranking in
searches.
My friend Steve Epner explains this best. Many magazine publishers put
out the same magazine, but use a different covers to please different
markets or to test which cover gets the most newsstand sales. TV Guide
is aggressively doing this (not to mention selling more TV Guides to
collectors, but that's a different story).
Side Doors are different covers on your website designed to please a
particular search engine. Each page is designed to have just the right
number of words in the right places to get a high ranking in a
particular search engine.
There are links on the page that direct the visitor to your homepage or
to other sub pages of your site. You can have hundreds of these side
doors for a single website, each one custom-tailored to suit different
search engines.
How does this work?
Let's make up some numbers. Let's say there are 100 words on your
homepage and 5 of them are keywords. Therefore, you have a 5 to 100
ratio or 5 percent of the words on the page are keywords. This ratio is
called the "keyword weight" or "keyword density." Maybe Alta Vista loves
5 to 100. Maybe another search engine doesn't like that; they want a 7
to 100 or 7 percent keyword density on a page.
You create individual pages that have the right keyword density and
submit them to the search engines (click
here to learn how to submit) Basically you have many different
covers to your website. You could end up with hundreds of these pages as
you continue to develop your website. By doing so, you give the search
engines a bigger target to try to hit.
Side doors can be housed on my main website, or on a different website
under my control. They are just different content pages that when
someone finds them in a search, allow the them to click to my homepage
or another page in my site.
CAUTION: In the old days (two weeks
ago hahaha) these side doors were created generically with a template.
You just put in any old words and the right number of keywords and
submitted them to the search engines. You would have put an "automatic
redirect" script on the page so the person clicking on the link listed
in the search results would never even see the side door page. They
would be automatically "redirected" to your real website.
This will not work anymore for two reasons:
1. The search engines are looking for template pages and refusing
to give them high rankings; and 2. The search engines are looking for
any pages that have an automatic redirect script and refusing those
pages high rankings because it knows that the page is a "fake" designed
to beat the system.
Side door pages now must appear to be a normal page in your site. Do not
use an automatic side door generator like you would find in a program
called "Web Position Gold" (although this is still a great program to
own for other web promotion tasks) and don't even think about using a
redirect script.
Counting KeyWords
You can use the "page critic" function of "Web Position Gold" to help
you with this, but I have found another tool for quick and dirty
analysis. It's called the Keyword Density Analyzer
http://foreverweb.com/proshop/kda/ . It checks the keyword
density (ratio of keywords to total number of words on the page)
instantly and saves me lots of time.
Make sure they are significantly different
If you get too crazy with this side door strategy you could cross over
the line and get accused of spamming the search engines which would get
your site banned. You can avoid this by making sure that each side door
page is not an identical copy of another page that only has a few words
replaced to change the keyword density.
How to create hundreds of side door pages efficiently
The first round of pages is the toughest unless of course you have
already written a book or lots of articles. Then it is pretty easy to
take very tiny portions of the book or articles and make a mini article
page (side door) for your website. I created about 150 of these pages in
one three-day weekend based on my book "Wake 'em Up."
I then gave them to a part time employee. The part time
employee took each article and changed it enough so that the page was
not identical. This can happen very quickly because the article is
already written. You are just making minor changes.
I am currently putting the same 150 articles on another
website. After that the employee will change the articles again and put
them on a third website. This gives me 450 side door pages from the same
body of work. (I could actually put them on the same website if I only
had one.) Don't I look stupid having multiple copies
of the same article on my site?
No I don't because a person on my site only has a chance to click to one
version of any articles. All the changed versions of the article are not
linked FROM the main site. They are only linked TO the main site if
someone finds that article in a search engine. It's kind of like a one
way valve that sends people TO my main site or sub pages on my main
site. SUB PAGES
These side door pages don't necessarily send people to my home page.
They can and should link a visitor to the exact sub page in my site that
they were originally looking for. Let's say someone
happened to be looking for phone skills training in a search engine.
They find one of my article pages about phone skills and click on the
link that says "Click here for a top notch customized phone skills
program." This link SHOULD NOT take the person to my home page. It
should take them directly to the "Phone Skills" training program page in
my website. I don't want the person to go to my home page and then have
to search around for the phone skills area. I want to send them directly
there. This means that any important sub pages in your
site can and should have their own set of side door article pages.
LASER STRIKE
What I have been describing above is the bulk side door method. I put
out hundreds and hundreds of pages that have a keyword density roughly
between 2 and 8 percent because that's roughly where the search engines
operate. This method better suits my personality because I'm not
tremendously patient and meticulous. The other method for
creating side doors (a combo of this method and the above bulk method is
best) is to create laser strike side door pages. This method requires
much more time and patience in creating each page. You won't end up with
hundreds and hundreds of these unless you have way too much time on your
hands or can afford to hire the work out. To create a
laser strike side door page you use a program like "Web Position Gold"
http://www.webposition.com You
would use the program's "Page Critic" function. This function goes to a
particular search engine on a particular keyword and analyzes the top
pages that came up in the search. It then reports back to you all the
details of keyword density, total word count etc. that those top ranking
pages have. You must then create a page that mimics the keyword density,
total word count etc of the top ranking pages and submit it to that
particular search engine. This gives you the highest statistical chance
of getting a high ranking. I have done this and achieved
good results. The problem is that I hated every minute of it and when
the search engine changed it's criteria for high rankings I had to do it
all over again. If you like tweaking and playing with this stuff, then
this method can be very effective. My bulk method is lots easier and
takes away the problem of redoing the pages every time the search engine
changes a little because I've go so many pages out there that if one
drops down in the rankings, then another one usually picks up.
Send me your suggestions for future Search Engine related articles for
this section. mailto:tom@antion.com
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