The primary key to getting fantastic search engine placement for your website is using a technique called “entrance pages”. Entrance pages have just one purpose: to rank highly on one search engine for one keyword phrase. Entrance pages aren’t pretty… what looks good to a search engine usually looks terrible to a human. Also, entrance pages must be specifically tuned to one phrase and one search engine.
Let’s examine the reasons for using entrance pages compared to just submitting your “home page” to the search engines. An entrance page is optimized by various techniques to achieve a high ranking on a particular search engine. Your home page may not have been optimized at all… or it may be optimized to generally achieve a moderate ranking on all search engines. You see, the techniques that achieve a high ranking on a search engine for a web page will kill your ranking on another search engine… so it’s practically impossible to achieve a high ranking on all the major search engines with only one page submitted (i.e. your home page).
That is why entrance pages are used. Using this technique, you can tune a web page to get a high ranking on one search engine for one keyword phrase. To achieve high rankings on all the major search engines for your keyword phrase, it is necessary to design multiple entrance pages. For example, if I want to rank highly under the keyword phrase “internet marketing” I will have to create separate pages for Alta Vista, HotBot, Lycos, Excite, InfoSeek, MSN, etc.
Entrance pages are not designed to look good. You don’t need a lot of graphics or glamour. What you do need are tags, tags,
It is important that you have links on your entrance pages. Wise webmasters link both to their own home page and all their other entrance pages. Following is a good example of a link on an entrance page: HREF”EXAMPLE.HTML”>keyword phrase goes here.
Last, but definitely not least, is your body text. Start your body text with your keyword phrase. Begin the next sentence with a synonym. Different engines require different amounts of body text, so experiment and see what ranks best for you. Don’t just repeat your keyword phrase or synonyms over and over. It’s best to sprinkle them throughout your text lightly.
One of the tricks professionals use is to analyze their page with a keyword density analyzer. There are several available. One that comes to mind is news.com/kda/”>“Keyword Density Analyzer”. A keyword density analyzer is the best way to make sure you are not repeating your keywords too many times on your entrance pages. For most search engines, a keyword density (number of keyword repetitions on your page compared to number of other words) is about 3% - 4%.
The final, most important thing to have on your entrance pages is a link to your website. DO NOT have a “meta-refresh” tag that automatically forwards people to your website and DO NOT use a JavaScript command to do it either… both will massacre your search engine ranking.
Once you have created your entrance pages, uploaded them to your server and submitted the URLs to the search engines (don’t do too many at once – you’ll be penalized), wait a month or two and you’ll have fantastic rankings. Be careful, unscrupulous webmasters search for high ranking entrance pages and like to steal the code to get their own high placements. One way to protect against this is by using cloaking software. It’s fairy easy to set up and use, and has the added bonus of never letting web surfers see your ugly entrance pages… they are automatically forwarded to your home page without ever knowing they went through an entrance page.
Check your rankings often, and experiment to get the best results. One good way to check your rankings is to use software like WebPosition Gold. You can also check them manually by visiting each search engine and searching for your keyword phrases.
Final advice: be patient and don’t give up. It isn’t always easy to get top rankings, especially when the competition for your keyword phrases is tough. Be creative, work hard, and you will get the hits your website deserves!
About the Author
Dan Kramer, of Volatile Graphix, Inc. dba KloakIt. Kloakit's web site is a resource for a shareware stealth script with many resources for web site promotion and CGI discussion. You can reach Dan at dan@kloakit.com or visit the KloakIt website at http://www.kloakit.com.