Your Home page is your most important page. This is the web page most likely to be linked to by external websites, and therefore to achieve the highest pagerank on Google. Doorway pages however should be avoided.
Home page
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A |
s most visitors will find your
site through your home page, its importance cannot
be underestimated. Remember when you are surfing
you will stay on a site based on the appearance
and usefulness of that site for your purposes.
Therefore focus your visitor’s attention
on the key benefits of your products and services.
Differentiate yourself from your competitors.
Details should be reachable via a hyperlink with
keyword-based teaser text wrapped around them.
"Focus your visitors attention on the key benefits of your products and services"
Keep the ability to purchase your services or products always readily to hand. Make purchasing as quick and easy as possible.
Search engines work with text, not graphics, so ensure that your home page includes at least 200 to 250 words.
Establish credibility using testimonials, awards and customer lists. Be open about your company and its purpose with an "About Us" page. Ensure "Contact Us" is easily found on any page for customer service.
Doorway pages
These are pages optimised to gain
a high ranking for a
particular phrase, they may well contain lots of keywords that dont make sense
next to each other to the human eye.
Google specifically warns against using this technique. However to keep you informed (just
in case you use an SEO company that employs this technique), I explain all below.
There is
only really one technique for achieving a
successful doorway page, although there are
various sophistications you can use to keep your
page high. Easiest is to produce a successful
page which looks good to the search engine, but
not humans, then swap
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"With Doorway pages budget for a lot of time to keep your page above the competition"
Using asp to recognise the search engines agent name and re-direct it to a specially optimised page is an improvement, you will have to stay on top of what each search engine calls itself to ensure this works though. (They change deliberately to overcome this technique).
The final layer is to stop a competitor "pretending" to be a search engine to see you code by using its IP address to determine which engine is looking at your code. This technique is called page cloaking. But, you will be caught out when a search engine periodically uses a fresh IP (they use many).
For this purpose you can also use agent name recognition to send a plain text version of the page to all search engines. This will reduce negative effects that design brings to the search engine spiders and algorithms.
For example body text needs to be as high as possible, so removing navigation text (which may be in a small font size), tables and images etc will all help.
Employing agent name recognition can help cut down on bandwidth costs too by avoiding sending images to spiders. Also with IP addressing you can block unwanted users out. It also has legitimate site design uses like recognising language, and substituting appropriate pages, although some asp code working off the language code would achieve the same effect. I wouldn't want to risk getting on Google's blacklist myself.
