Doorway pages have gained bad names because the way they cheat search engines into believing their pages are worth the rankings.

Why doorway pages have become ineffective

This method of obtaining search engine rankings has become more ineffective nowadays and many people have stopped using it. The reason is simple. While page content is still used to determine search engine position, there a myriad of other factors that are added into the algorithm.

As page content have less weight than it used to have, applying this technique to your site may have very little benefits, if at all.

Search engines are also optimizing their algorithms so any page that jump out of nowhere to claim on the first page of search result pages will eventually get bumped out every now and again.

What still works?

This is not to say that it is entirely ineffective.

For less competitive or minor keywords, you can still rank in the first page for very little effort. Perhaps with a well optimized page is enough. At the most, add one or two inbound links.

In fact it is used everyday by web publishers and bloggers.

A good example is product review. When a new product comes out to the market — let’s say it is a cell phone, usually there are a surge in search around that phone, specifically up to the brand and series.

Bloggers who blog about this product, usually in the format of news or review, will eventually get into the first or second page of search engine result pages. If they are fast enough, of course.

Often, without any inbound link whatsoever, the page ranks on the first position. If other bloggers or webmasters link to the page, the pages become more important and outrank others.

Before that happens, usually who has the page into search engine first will enjoy the traffic and perhaps some links from others — because chances are other bloggers use that page as a reference for their post.

How to make doorway pages work?

Knowing how easy it is to get traffic based on minor keywords, you should first concentrate your new site for those keywords. Not only does this technique allows you to start building traffic, but most importantly you can begin your link campaign easily this way.

To make doorway pages work, we would create what I call information pages.

For each minor keyword you want to target, write useful information around the keyword or keyphrase. Real content, not spam.

Work on minor and less competitive keywords first, let your pages rank on those keywords, secure or lock the positions and then work the way up.

I would recommend against making thousands of new pages of junk content on your site. That will only devalue your site and get them delisted from search engines.

Instead, do your research and build well optimized pages with real content. This is when doorway page software which automatically generate pages that are very optimized — putting the right keywords in the right positions can make it easy for you.

If you take the time to learn some basic SEO, you won’t need that software at all though.