Main Doorway Page

[madmal]

We are in the process of creating our main doorway page.
How many keywords are optimal?

my boss recommends big is beautiful? is the necessarily the story?

my boss wants 50 keywords i reecommend at maximum twenty?

[freejung]

Hi madmal,

?

What do you mean, "main doorway page"? I think you probably don't want to use this terminology, it's confusing and refers to a shady practice.

I think you mean your homepage, right? There's little chance that one page is going to rank for 50 keywords. You should target the main page to a small number, maybe 4 or 5 or so, of your most important and general keyword combinations. Focus most strongly on just one or two, these are the ones you will want to put in the TITLE and in all the text links which point back to the page from other pages in your site. Then target the rest of your keywords with subpages. These should not be doorway pages as such, but rather useful and informative articles about the keywords in question.

Hope that helps. You should read the Google faq and Brett's 12 months doc if you haven't already.

[freejung]

Oh, also, if you're just talking about the contents of your keywords meta tag, don't worry about that so much. It counts for very little. Your real keywords are the words and phrases which appear in your TITLE, headings, body text, and inbound anchor text, most importantly, though you may want to put them other places as well. Do not underestimate the importance of inbound anchor text (or the power of the Dark Side!).

[felix]

...if you're just talking about the contents of your keywords meta tag, don't worry about that so much. It counts for very little.

True, but IMHO there is one notable exception. Having a large number of keywords in the meta tags that are unrelated to the title text, body text, and anchor text can be considered spam. So while they probably don't help much, they can hurt if used improperly.

[miles]

Boss ehhh! Bosses in most cases know very little about the internet, and how to get listings, all they really know is that they want the most for their money and they know that some people have made some serious bank and they want in on it.

Well here is what I have done in the past to start out at about 200 to 400 text and about 30 percent keyword density, with each keyword as a link to the coresponding page. You can even throw in the meta info...ahhh spamming just like the good ole' days. You dont have to use just one domain for the doorway pages, If your boss thinks more is better.

Its funny one time I had a customer that purchased I think 40 or 50 domains for doorway page usage. He blew all that money on what could have been had with 3 or 4 domains.

[mrguy]

If your referring to a "Doorway" page in the traditional since of creating a page strictly for ranking, do so knowing that you will eventually be either filtered or turned in by a competitor and will probably suffer a penalty or outright ban.

Why not convince the bosses to partake upon a real foundation of SEO that would hold up to a human review and not get your site banned?

You will enjoy better longevity on Google if you start out not trying to find ways to manipulate it with things like doorway pages.

If you look at their TOS, Doorway pages are mentioned as being bad several times.

There is more than enough information on Webmaster World to achieve solid results without cheating.

There are some on this board that live on the edge and I guess thrive on sweating out every dance. Then, when they get caught they jump on the board and try to justify why they were spamming and shouldn't of been dropped, etc,...