Old timers will remember this phrase with very negative connotations. Around the year 2000, a “Doorway Site” meant a “fake” site that looked just like the site you were going to, which existed just to fool the Search Engines into thinking
that they are multiple sites with different keywords, yet humans wouldn’t know that they were separate at all. (They could cover more keywords that way.)
That trick is so obvious to every Search Engine now that no one even attempts it anymore. They’d get their IP address banned for sure.Nowadays, a lot of Internet Marketers are reviving the phrase to mean a slightly different, much more SE-friendly strategy of link building.
These new ‘Doorway Sites’ are usually just blogs or informational websites such as an “AdSense Farm” site. However, its main purpose, whether it displays Ads on it or not, is just to exist as an on-topic link to the owner’s primary website!
The fact is that websites are so cheap and easy to spit out these days, even with well placed keywords and content, that it’s actually worth the time of a dedicated webmaster trying to build lots of relevant, one-way links to make these websites just for the linking value alone.
Obviously this is a long-term strategy that won’t be getting you any clicks or even rank improvement this week. To do it right you’ll need to make this doorway site with well-placed keywords, semi-fresh content, and submit it to all the link directories before linking it to your primary website.
Still, if you’re in it for the long-haul, imagine what 50 or more of these pointing to one site will do for it’s ranking, all targeting a different primary keyword on topic.One serious concern is that Googlebot checks IP addresses. A few of these websites sharing the same IP address at your server host is fine… But there is an upper limit and Google isn’t telling us exactly what that limit is.
If you get serious about this technique, you may find yourself spending a lot of money on hosting in order to purchase IP addresses on separate “class C blocks,” which will fool any Search Engine into thinking that the separate sites aren’t owned by the same person.
Another approach is to make your websites in lots of different free blogging or free website platforms, like Blogger, Wordpress, Freewebs, etc… Naturally this is much more time consuming because of the variation.
There is probably no better first marketing step for any website at all than submitting it to the top 400 or so Link Directories. As you can see from my rating, it’s not even close to being your best method of traffic generation. However, if you care about incoming links to your website, this is THE FOUNDATION that all other links will build on, because Search Engines start in these places and find your website through the links you place in them.
I’ve built over 300 different websites for all kinds of different purposes in my career, but I have submitted all of them to the legitimate link directories without fail. It’s a no-brainer that really should be thought of as necessary, despite the piddling amount of traffic it brings.
There are probably more link directories out there than anyone could ever submit to, but luckily it is only important to submit to the ones that have some PageRank. Even still, the number of submissions you could wind up making for each site will be between 400 and 500, so this is not a quick task to do. Without software to keep up with all of them, and of course to help you paste your content into all of those forms, you’d take way too long to finish a single site’s posting.
It used to cost a lot for software that would submit to all the best directories, (As I know well, I have paid out the nose!) But luckily for you there is now a completely Free software that will submit to all the best Directories. (It can be upgraded to do them all, but the free selection is SO much better than doing it by hand.) It’s simply called Directory Submitter, and it’s made by the same guy who did SEO Elite, so you know it’s quality stuff. Download it ASAP and make it part of your marketing regimen for every website or blog you start for the rest of your life.
A little like a Trafficbar, Desktop Messaging is a way to send ads via an email-sized communication directly to the desktop of people you’ve talked into loading the software program.
Although this sounds like an impossible way to build traffic, it does have the very handy side-effect of being completely free of spam filters, so when using this as a way to send newsletters to your list or downline, you get 100% delivery, instantly.
It’s more like a messenger service than an email program though, and convincing a downline to sign up to hear your thoughts each week, at the cost of them hearing 13 other’s thoughts as well, sounds like an impossible task. (You only receive 1 message a week from each of the 14 people in your upline.)
The only popular choice is Desktop Lightning, none others have built up a following large enough to consider.It’s interesting, at any rate, so if you can use other tactics like safelists or traffic exchanges to build up your Desktop Lightning downline, then perhaps you’ll find a way for it to be useful.
Naturally, the only people to install this on their desktops will be other internet marketers, so don’t even bother trying if you are marketing to any other niche at all.
Digg.com is a Social Bookmarking tool with extraordinary power. (The best of all social bookmarkers.) It’s completely free to use this to generate some of the fastest and most serious traffic of all online, although your content needs to be interesting. See “Social Bookmarking” for more about this highly recommended Web 2.0 application.