How to make content rich doorway pages that last

I see people are searching for information on “content rich doorway pages”. The doorway page had its heyday in the late 1990s when most search engines were easily fooled by deceptive redirecting pages. You really didn’t have to do much to achieve high rankings for competitive keywords back then because the competition was nowhere near as fierce as today.

Although there are still black hat SEOs who pump out doorway pages by the thousands per minute, I feel these guys are second- or third-tier amateurs who are playing catchup with real black hat science. The better doorways are content rich doorway pages, but even there many people in the black hat community are no better than script kiddies who buy someone else’s burned out software and turn out ridiculous looking “Markov-chain” deranged garbage.

The white hat SEO community has taken the Content Rich Doorway concept and restricted its use largely to serve as PPC landing pages. Because A-B testing and conversion tracking requires that you maintain a sterile environment around your PPC landing pages, they are rarely linked to by metrics-savvy SEOs. So the pages look good, really good, but they don’t appear in organic search results.

An effective landing page needs to be aesthetically pleasing, it has to engage the visitor, and it has to have a compelling call to action. After all, you paid to have someone visit that landing page so you certainly want to get a transaction to recoup your investment. I find that a lot of landing pages look better for business sites than most of their organic pages.

While there is something to be said for creating natural language content that is not highly optimized for a particular keyword, there is no reason for why you cannot take your landing page skills and use them to custom design organic content for your site. That means creating Content Rich Doorway pages that will not only appear in the natural search results but which also have a decent chance of obtaining good rankings.

Content Rich Doorway pages tend to differ from natural content pages in several ways:

1. The Content Rich Doorway page is more tightly focused on a single topic. It’s basically a low-intensity sales pitch.
2. The Content Rich Doorway page does NOT carry cross-promotional advertising. You don’t want to distract the visitor from your call to action because the CRD is the page they have been looking for
3. The Content Rich Doorway page includes an active call to action rather than a passive call to action. Active = form, passive = link to another page
4. The Content Rich Doorway page is all inclusive. You don’t break up your CRD content across multiple pages.

Content Rich Doorway pages look like the rest of your site because:

1. Content Rich Doorway pages use the same page template/design as every other page on your site
2. Content Rich Doorway pages use the same core navigation as the rest of your site (if you have multiple navigation systems on a large site, your CRD pages should have minimal navigation)
3. Content Rich Doorway pages are linked to from the rest of your site (site map, parent page, sibling pages, articles that include cross-promotional links to CRD pages, etc.)

You want to include your disclaimers, privacy links, etc. on your Content Rich Doorway pages. These pages are part of your Web site. You want them to be user-friendly (engaging and accessible). You do not for any reason want to hide them, mask them, redirect them, etc.

Content Rich Doorway pages are actually widely used in eCommerce today. You see them on Amazon, eBay, and other large mega eTailers. But wait! Those guys include cross-promotional links on their CRDs. Why do I say you should not do this?

Call it an exercise. You’re pounding the rice bags to improve your strength and harden your muscles. You’re learning to take the pain of creating effective, tightly focused content that targets as few searchable expressions as possible.

Content Rich Doorway pages teach you how to look at content — all content — with a true optimizer’s point of view. Every blog post, forum rant, site review, free article, press release, feature article, product description, biography, etc. you write should be created with either the unconscious intention to rank for something or the conscious choice not to rank for anything in particular.

You’ll shed years of cheap title-crafting tricks as you improve your ability to write well-focused, natural-language rich content for these types of doorway pages. You’ll stop fussing over page URLs if you spend more time thinking about how to create a compelling page that engages the reader and gets them to fill out that form (OR click on that link if you’re really just promoting another site and not trying to sell something).

Content Rich Doorway pages are billboards on the Web. They’re not classified ads. They’re not 15-minute presentations at the local Rotary club dinner. They are 30-second pitches located at stategic points along the information superhighway. Elevator pitches have more time and opportunity to succeed than do Content Rich Doorway pages.

You need to spend more time writing your CRD meta description than your title.

You need to spend more time writing your body copy than figuring out where to place the page on your site.

You need to spend more effort promoting this page through links than your root URL.

You can promote one page (your root URL) for 100 different expressions or you can promote 100 pages for 100 different expressions. If you provide substantial, useful content that people are looking for on those 100 pages, you stand a better chance of improving your conversions than if you ask them all to click through your root URL page.

So you need to create “link worthy” Content Rich Doorway pages. They need to be informative, unbiased, instructional, user-engaging content pages. They need to be something other than smarmy-looking sales pitch pages clouded up with anonymous testimonials.

In short, Content Rich Doorway pages need to be composed and design to last as long as your Web site. But if you find that you have discontinued whatever product or service you were pitching, don’t use 301-redirects to take the page out of search results. Find a way to reshape the page so that it helps your site in other ways. Immediately change the title and meta description.

Think of a Content Rich Doorway page as an asset that has value in itself. Whatever content you place on the page is important, but the page is important, too.

Content Rich Doorway pages are not disposable items. If you create 1,000,000 Content Rich Doorway pages they all need to provide some real value to the searchers who are looking for 1,000,000 different products, services, or tips that you’re offering.

But before you fire up the old CMS and Markov-crap generator, try writing these pages by hand. Take the time to do it right and you’ll understand why autogenerated mush doesn’t serve your purposes nearly so well.