“We Will Create Doorway Pages for You!”
Entry pages, portal pages, gateway pages, jump pages, doorway pages: whatever you call them they do not provide a tangible SEO strategy for your business. In the old days, these tactics worked, but search engines quickly realized there was a lot of clutter making its way into the search engine results. Clutter devalues search engines, so it is no surprise they have adjusted their algorithms to deal with this tactic.
So how do you spot a doorway page? Typically doorway pages cannot be reached from your main website’s navigation. The intention is that you reach your main website through the doorway page, but never the reverse. Doorway pages are also very obviously designed to attract search engines, and not necessarily human visitors. This is evident by the repetition of keywords and phrases and the nonsensical sounding language on the page.
The purpose of the doorway page is to artificially rank the page in the search engines, attract visitors and obtain a click-through to the main website. Not only do search engines shun these types of pages, but as you can imagine, they are not very effective for human visitors either.
“Welcome to the best Sarasota SEO website in the best Sarasota SEO city in the Sarasota SEO world! We Sarasota SEO your website better than any other Sarasota SEO company in the Sarasota SEO universe! In case you didn’t Sarasota SEO realize it, we’re targeting Sarasota SEO with this Sarasota SEO landing page!”
If you visit a page that is designed like this are you going to click through to the website, or will you think they are insane and click the Back button? I mean, really….
However, don’t confuse this tactic with what you should be doing for your Pay Per Click (PPC) landing pages. PPC landing pages should be designed to receive click-through traffic from ads and deliver very targeted information to visitors (without all the crazy repetition of course.) PPC landing pages should prompt the completion of the primary call-to-action on the page, such as calling a special phone #, completing a contact form, etc. But these pages are not designed to artificially rank in the search engine results; they are designed to Conversion Rate Optimzation best practice standards.
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