Note: The content of this article is both obsolete and can get you banned on the search engines. At one point in time it was considered state-of-the-art. These days it is considered spam. Don't do it. I include this page only to warn you against a bad practice. Editor.

 With search engines indexing 50 to 100 million webpages, it's extremely difficult for your company's site to even show up in the top 200 in a search -- especially if you have a lot of competitors or if people need a commonly-used search word to find you. It used to be enough to have good content and use some META tags with keywords and a description. No more. Now you have to write the content to suit the search engine if you want to rank high on a search.

I don't like this. It isn't ideal. But that's the way the Internet is right now. Webpages you write to suit the search engine are called gateway or doorway or bridge pages.. They provide a gateway to the rest of your site for people coming from a particular search engine. What you do to rank high in AltaVista will lower your ranking in Infoseek, so you'll need a gateway page for each major search engine.

Can't you fine-tune your existing home page? You should try, but since different search engines have different tastes, you'd have to tune your home page for just one of them to stand a chance of ranking high. Moreover, gateway pages do better when you keep the writing focused on one topic with a precise number of keywords used in precise places on the page. Your home page needs to be more general than that.

What Does a Gateway Page Look Like?

If they're done well, you'll hardly know a gateway page when you see one. But here are some things to look out for that could indicate a gateway page (though many gateway pages will lack some of these features):

• The page appears high in the searches
• Nearly all the links go to another domain name.
• A particular word or phrase seems repeated in the title using different capitalizations.
• A word or phrase pops up again and again in the text of the page.
• A page with few words says something like "To learn more about ... click here."
• The page has just a single hyperlink or linked graphic that takes you to another page.

Knowing something about HTML is important if you want to understand what makes gateway pages click, so you might want to study some gateway pages with a book at your side.

The Ideal Gateway Page

Ideally, a gateway page should be instructive to the visitor at the same time as it sends him on to the webpages where sales are made. It should have the same look and feel as the rest of the site, and should be just as visibly pleasurable to visit as the home page itself. You don't want your visitor to feel cheated. When your gateway page adds to the visitor's experience of your business, he will be more ready to appreciate and purchase your products once he or she arrives at the sales page.

How to Make a Gateway Page

Of course, there are many tricks of the trade when it comes to producing gateway pages that we can't go into here. But this is the essence.

To make a gateway page, first decide how you want to introduce a visitor to your site. What message or feeling do you want to convey? Next, decide what keyword or keyphrase you want to emphasize. Then write a paragraph or two that using the keyword or phrase a number of times. Add a title that displays the keyphrase prominently. Construct META tags for keywords and a description. Include the keyword in an H3 heading or two. Finally, provide links in which the keywords appear. For example you might link the word "work boots" with a webpage filename such as /work-boots/work-boots.htm.

Though you can do this through trial and error, I strongly recommend using a program like WebPosition Gold (www.wilsonweb.com/afd/webposition.htm) to analyze your gateway page for each search engine. Then make the recommended changes to bring your gateway page within the optimum ranges recommended by the program's Page Critic feature.

Finally, upload your page to the webserver, submit the URL to the search engine you've tuned it for, and monitor the results. If you did the job well, your page will rank in the top 10 or 20. Then fine-tune the page again to see if you can raise the ranking.

A Corridor of Doorways

However, you probably need more than just a single doorway page. You need a whole set -- or two, or three. Let me explain. The most important search tool is Yahoo, but it isn't technically a search engine that uses mystical formulas to rank pages. Yahoo depends upon human editors to classify sites and edit descriptions. (See accompanying article "How to Get Listed in Yahoo") The actual search engines that are important in March 1999 are (1) Excite/WebCrawler, (2) Infoseek, (3) Lycos, (4) HotBot (Inktomi), (5) AltaVista, and, arguably (6) Northern Light. Excite and WebCrawler use a very similar algorithm (search results formula), so we group those together. Ideally, you need one gateway page for each of these six search engines for each keyword or keyphrase that a visitor might use to find you.

Let's say you sell men's workboots. What keywords or phrases might people use to find you? boots, work boots, workboots, man, men, construction, farm, insulated. Perhaps some combination. Though you can group some of these words together, you'll probably want to construct at least four or five different sets of pages.

6 search engines X 5 keywords/phrases = 30 gateway pages

It might be wise to start with the most commonly used words first, and not try to build the whole set at once. Also, you might target the search engines you deem most important and work on those first.

If this looks like a lot of work, you're right. The process is time-consuming and often frustrating. But when you get ranked in the #2 or #3 position on Lycos or HotBot, you'll feel really good -- and your site traffic and sales will begin to glow.