Rookie 1st time poster! Bear with me... Couple of questions. Have been working with a relative (webmaster by trade) for the past several months, and attempting to establish myself as a seo. He has been feeding me some sites that he has designed to optimize for him, to give me some "practice" as it were. I am trying to establish some ranking results for bragging rights (and credability) BEFORE I start offering my services to the rest of the world. That being said, I have been somewhat limited as to what I can do to improve the sites I have been working on. As could be expected the site owners, (and webmaster :)are a little reticent to let a rookie start making changes to the content of their existing pages just to see what happens. I have made some changes to meta tags, page titles, etc., submitted, and have had some decent placement results. (Despite the fact that the webmaster person loves frames and Flash) What I am leaning towards at this point is creating some doorway pages (well done of course, similiar backgrounds, colors, text styles, etc.) that would be keyword rich in content, headings, etc. and linked back to appropriate pages. Big rookie question is: once these doorway pages are created and uploaded, are they visible to anyone OR just to the Search engines? If just the search engines are able to view them, I can achieve some rankings for the site owners, and no one will know any changes have been made (cept the webmaster of course), until the rankings start to change. Tis a pain to be doing this backwards, however.....credability is the name of the game. BTW....have been careful to do things the "right" way, no tricks, no spamming, hand submissions, etc. Thanks for any advice yall can provide!
