Doorway Pages & Links

by Phil Craven

This entails turning an existing content page into a doorway page and creating some user-viewable content pages to accompany it.

The idea is to pick the most suitable existing content page for a particular target searchterm, and then build up its weight/relevance for the searchterm by creating and linking several new pages around it. In this way the site ends up with a small themed group of pages, all about the same topic (the searchterm), and linked together to create a themed group of pages - the theme being the target searchterm. It's very much like Strategy 1 except that the pages are created and optimized by hand, and are user-viewable content pages.

There are a number of 'excuses' that can be used to create some new, user-viewable pages. E.g. (a) if the existing page is quite large, split it into 2 or more pages, (b) if the page contains a small picture that can be clicked to see a larger one, open the larger picture in a new page and add some optimized content to it, (c) add one or two 'further information' pages, etc.

Each page, including the original, should be optimized for the target searchterm, of course. Each page can contain a different amount of text, but none of the pages should contain a very large amount of text. Keep the biggest page down to about 600 words (preferably less) and the smallest page not less than about 150 words.

If they are linked all-to-all, each of the pages can be the doorway page for a particular search engine. The page that most closely matches a particular search engine's algorithm will be supported (given relevant weight) by the others pages. If it is prefered that one particular page should be the doorway page, then link it to each of the others, and link each of the others back to it - an arrowhead formation.