It is usually most effective to first focus on improving a site’s current content. By adjusting text placement, consolidating information, and creating rich semantic markup we can strategically target your desired keyword-dense areas.

When additional content is needed, it is possible to utilize our copywriting services. If Attain undertakes the copywriting, we will work to keep the content from appearing forcefully “keyword rich” and awkward to position on the site.

Many businesses have content and other underutilized informational resources available. Taking advantage of current copy is often preferred from both a marketing and cost standpoint. Many e-commerce businesses can also generate usable content from analyzing their product database.

For Example:

If you provide used car listings, do you know whether search engine users primarily type “used autos” or “used cars”?

What percentage of your site is optimized for “used autos” and what percentage for “used cars”?

This is where our analysis and tools can assist.

Each webpage address should clearly represent what the page is displaying. Page links are often book-marked, emailed or instant messaged to friends, listed in directories, and transferred in other ways. Lengthy, cumbersome URLs are prone to wrap or break, and not give any indication of their content.

For Example:

A web page address like this:
www.WidgetFactory.com/small-blue-widgets.html

is preferred over: www.WidgetFactory.com/exec/products/viewdetail.dll?id=342846&session=AF723A&displaytype=user

Depending on the architecture of your website, a less straightforward translation may be required. While an intermediary form can be a lot less common they are more desirable then a URL completely devoid of keyword content.

One of the most commonly used questionable optimization techniques is the doorway page, also known as:

• Landing Pages
• Gateway Pages
• Directory Information Pages (DIPs)
• Mirror Sites
• Satellite Sites
• Magnet Sites
• Channel Pages
• Search Engine Entry Pages
• Shadow Domains

It is rare to find an SEO firm employing this tactic will candidly refer to them as doorway pages any longer, due to the reputation the word triggers. Regardless of terminology, these all typically implement the same basic effects of a doorway page.

Attempts made to get a clear definition of what exactly these pages do often lead to a sales rep waxing eloquent in their phrases and terms to avoid a open description of the function of the page.

Often the easiest way to get a doorway page absorbed into Google is via cloaking, the process of showing particular content to search engine crawlers and hiding it from site visitors.

In the doorway page example, we detected that cloaking was in fact what they were employing. Disguising ourselves as the Googlebot, we browsed their homepage and discovered many city specific links.

Yet, the extreme benefits of cloaking will only last for a season. As soon as someone files a complaint to the search engines about the website (which we did) or they are detected for cloaking by the engine’s robots, which potentially can take many months, heavy ranking penalties will be applied.

Why Does it Matter?

Are these techniques just an annoying phenomenon?

The content on the page was not created for users. It was created for search engines, providing almost no value to the site visitor. The content was also automatically generated by swapping out city names with a program on a content template.

A company using doorway pages does not want anyone to read or see these pages unless it is the only option they have to get you to land on their website.

When people search and get tricked, rather than get what they are looking for, the search engine looses, they lose and the legitimate companies that should have been ranked there lose.

We would argue this is unethical and is similar to spam.