Gateway Pages

We are going to examine how you too can benefit from using gateway pages, also known as entry, or doorway pages. We'll refer to them here as doorway pages, as it is conceptually important to imagine people knocking on these doors - they're not inside yet, and if you don't answer the door with the right information, they'll knock on someone else's.

First off, let's answer the obvious questions, what are they, and why do you want to use them? Doorway pages are single-page websites that link to one or more other sites. They are like calling cards on the Internet, brief enough to be effective at transferring traffic to its final destination, but informative enough to gain search engine positioning. Let's face it, redirect pages that blast a surfer across the Web to some unknown site once may have worked, but Internet users are smarter these days. So we're not concerned with programming tricks, but with creating some well-designed and informative pages that will entice a surfer to click on the link(s).

Your doorway page should offer information that prompts a search engine user to visit your page. For example, you could offer "Ten Secrets to Making Money with Home Based Internet Businesses." It is important to remember that your doorway page should be a real page, not just a keyword-heavy shell. So offer real information, like our "Ten Secrets" example. Your page should load as fast as possible, so don't plaster large images all over the place. Instead, offer a small logo image, along with your content, and of course your link to the main site.

When you use your first doorway page, you should limit yourself to two or three specific phrases that use the keywords you will target to the search engines. For example, you might use:

home business
make money
work from home

if you really are determined to as successful as you can, you'll want to categorize your doorway pages by the rank it receives in individual search engines.