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Creating Keyword Rich Pages For The Search Engines
by Sumantra Roy

Once you have established the keywords for which you should 
optimize your site for the search engines, it is time to figure 
out how you can get a high ranking in the search engines for 
those keywords. Should you create those everybody-hates-it-but- 
everybody-does-it doorway pages?  

Well, yes and no. Doorway pages are great in theory but can be 
an administrative nightmare. Since each search engine uses a 
different algorithm to rank pages, you will need to create 
doorway pages for each keyword and for each search engine. Since 
the search engines frequently change their rankings, you'll need 
to constantly change those doorway pages in order to ensure that 
they continue to obtain top rankings. Furthermore, if you are 
targeting a reasonably high number of keywords, you can easily 
bank on creating hundreds of such doorway pages. Can you imagine 
the sheer administrative difficulty in keeping track of all 
these pages? You'll soon be spending more time on search engine 
optimization than on carrying on your normal business 
activities! 
 
The method that I recommend is two-fold. Initially, don't worry 
about the differences in the algorithms between the search 
engines. Just assume that all the search engines use the same 
algorithm while determining the ranking of pages. At this stage, 
you should create what I prefer to call "Keyword Rich Pages" 
(KRPs). Each of these KRPs are optimized for one keyword and are 
intended to rank highly in all the search engines. Once you have 
created these KRPs, and once the search engines have spidered 
these pages, find out which (if any) of the search engines have 
not given a high rank to these KRPs. 

If you have created the KRPs properly, there shouldn't be too 
many such search engines. Once you have determined the search 
engines which have not ranked the KRPs properly, create doorway 
pages which are optimized for these individual search engines. 
This method allows you to get top rankings in all the search 
engines by minimizing the number of pages that you have to 
create. 
 
1) The first thing to remember is that some search engines don't 
recognize the Meta Description tag. These search engines will 
often simply take the first few lines of text in the body of 
your page and display that as the description. Hence, you must 
ensure that the first few lines of text in your page are 
attractive to human beings. 
 
2) Ensure that each sentence or every other sentence that you 
use contains your target keyword once. The keyword shouldn't 
just be placed on an ad hoc basis - the way the keyword is 
placed in every sentence should actually make grammatical sense. 
This is not only important from the point of view of ensuring 
that your readers don't get a bad impression of your site, but 
also from the point of view of search engine optimization - the 
search engines may penalize your page for spamming if they find 
that you have randomly repeated the keyword throughout the page. 
 
3) Make sure that your paragraphs are not too long - each 
paragraph should be no more than 3 or 4 sentences long. This is 
because people on the web simply don't have the time or the 
inclination to read long paragraphs.  

4) Try to ensure that the page contains links to other pages 
with the keyword being present in the text under the link. This 
can often lead to a higher ranking for your page.  

5) If possible, link to other pages which have the keyword in 
the file names. This can again lead to a higher ranking for your 
page.  

6) There is no hard and fast rule regarding the total number of 
words that should be present in the KRPs. As a rule of thumb, 
try to ensure that there are between 500-600 words. However, if 
the number of words falls short of or exceeds this limit, don't 
worry too much - it's not that important. 
 
Once you have created the page, ensure that the name of the file 
in which it is saved contains the keyword and that the 
individual words of the keyword are separated by hyphens. In 
this example, the name of the file is travel-to-australia.html. 
This will get you a higher ranking in the few search engines 
which give a lot of emphasis on the keyword being present in the 
URL.  

Now that you have created the KRPs, how do you ensure that they 
are spidered by the search engines? Do you simply upload the 
KRPs to your server and then submit each of the individual KRPs 
to the search engines? You can do that, but you may get a higher 
ranking if you allow the search engines to spider your pages by 
following links to them, rather than by submitting them manually. 
Furthermore, the search engines also take a rather dim view of 
pages which only contain outgoing links to other pages but do 
not contain any incoming links from other pages. The search 
engines will often recognize these pages as doorway pages and 
may penalize such pages. 
 
What you should do is to provide a link to these KRPs from the 
home page of your site. Now, you don't want people who are 
seeing the home page to actually follow these links to the KRPs 
- you only want the search engines to follow these links. 
However, you can't create links with hidden text (i.e. text with 
the same color as the background color) in your page since the 
search engines will almost certainly penalize or even ban you 
for doing this. 
 
What you should do is to create a small image which has the same 
background color as the home page. Then, name this image with 
the same file name as the name of the KRP you have created. 
Hence, in this case, you should name the image travel-to- 
australia.gif. Then, add this image to the end of the home page 
and have it link to the KRP. Also, in the Alt tag of this image, 
add the keyword that you are targeting once. Furthermore, you 
should explicitly set the border of the image to 0 (add border = 
"0" to the img tag of the image). Otherwise, when you get the 
image to link to the KRP, a border may be visible. 
 
That's it! When you want to target another keyword, create 
another KRP for it, make a copy of the image that you created 
for the first keyword, rename it to the file name of the new 
KRP, add the image to the home page and then link it to the new 
KRP. Repeat this process for every keyword that you are 
targeting. Once you have created all the KRPs and once you have 
got the home page to link to each of them, submit your site to 
the search engines. Don't submit any of the individual pages in 
your site - submit only the URL for the home page of your site. 
While the search engines may take a long time to spider all the 
internal pages if you don't submit them individually, I would 
still recommend not submitting them individually as this may get 
your KRPs a higher ranking in the search engines.  

Follow all the rules that I have outlined in this article and 
you can soon see your search engine blues disappear for ever!  
I hope this helps in your future marketing decisions. 

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Article by Sumantra Roy, one of the most respected and recognized 
search engine positioning specialists on the Internet. Sumantra 
publishes an excellent online newsletter on search engine 
positioning called the 1st Search Ranking Newsletter. You can 
subscribe to it at http://www.1stSearchRanking.com/newsletter.htm 
He has also recently created an outstanding new software for 
improving the link popularity of your site called LinkExplore. 
You can find out more about it at http://www.LinkExplore.com  
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