Step 5: Once you have eliminated the pages belonging to sites which have been registered by The Open Directory and Yahoo!, you should be left with a few pages. Since, as I mentioned earlier, link popularity is an increasingly important factor these days, it implies that a site with higher link popularity may be ranked higher than a site with lower link popularity, even though the second site may have had better placement of keywords. Hence, the page that you emulate should be the one with the lowest link popularity since this page has managed to come up at the top primarily because it has optimal placement of keywords.

In order to know how you can measure link popularity in the different search engines, have a look at my article on this topic.

Now the question arises as to whether you should be concerned about the link popularity of an individual page or of the site which owns the page. The research that I have conducted indicates that barring a few exceptions, the search engines consider the link popularity of the site as a whole - not the link popularity of the individual pages. The search engines make an exception when dealing with sites which are hosted by the free hosts like Geocities, Tripod etc. For the free hosts, it is the link popularity of the individual pages which count.

Hence, assuming that the page is not lying in one of the free hosts, you should check the link popularity of the site which contains the page and not the individual page. If you are targeting search engines like Excite which do not allow you to measure link popularity, I recommend that you measure link popularity in AltaVista.

Once you have measured the link popularity of the individual sites, the page that you should emulate is the one which belongs to the site with the lowest link popularity.

Step 6: Now it's time to create the doorway page. Create a new HTML file and add text to the body of the page. The way you create the text of your page would depend largely on what you want the visitor to do after reading this page. In some cases, you may simply want the visitor to go to a home page or another specific page in your site after reading this page. In this case, you should write the text in such a way that the visitor is attracted to the page that you are targeting. You would also want to provide links to the home page or the specific page that you are targeting at strategic places in the doorway page. Or, you may want the visitor to click on the link to an affiliate program that you are a member of. In this case, you would stress the benefits that the visitor gets by purchasing the product or service that the affiliate program is selling. You would also want to provide links to the affiliate program at strategic places in the doorway page and/or at the end of the doorway page. Whatever it is that you want your page to do, there are some general rules to follow:

1) The first thing to remember is that some search engines don't recognize the Meta Description tag. These search engines will often simply take the first few lines of text in the body of your page and display that as the description. Hence, you must ensure that the first few lines of text in your page are attractive to human beings.

2) Make sure that your paragraphs are not too long - each paragraph should be no more than 3 or 4 sentences long. This is because people on the web simply don't have the time or the inclination to read long paragraphs.

Step 7: Now, fire up your copy of WebPosition Gold. If you don't have a copy of WebPosition Gold with you, you can read my review of WebPosition Gold and download a free trial version from here.

Start a new Page Critic mission. Enter the complete path of the doorway page that you have just created in the second text box in the "Page Setup" tab of the Page Critic window. Enter your target keyword in the third text box. Make sure that the "Summarize Analysis Data" option is not checked. Now click on the Settings tab, and choose the search engine for which you are creating the doorway page. I also recommend that you uncheck the "Display Top Average Scores for this engine" option. In the "Comparison File Name or URL" text box, enter the complete path of the page which you had selected for comparison using steps 1 to 5. Now click on the Start button and save the mission when you are prompted to. WebPosition Gold will soon display a page which will compare the statistics of the doorway page that you have created with the statistics of the page that you are using for comparison.

Now tweak the doorway page so that the statistics (i.e. the Frequency, Words, Weight, Average Prominence and Starting Positions) for the different elements (i.e. the Title, the Meta Description, the Meta Keywords, the Heading, the Link text, the HyperLink URL, the Alt tag, the Comment, and the Body Text) of the doorway page are as close as possible to the statistics for the page which you are using for comparison. If you don't know the meaning of terms like Frequency, Weight etc., simply click on those words in the heading of the table to get an explanation of those words.

I am not suggesting, of course, that you simply copy what is present in the comparison page - that will be a copyright violation. What I am suggesting is that you modify the doorway page in such a way that the statistics for the different elements in the doorway page are similar to those in the comparison page.

When you see a discrepancy between the statistics for a particular element of your doorway page and the comparison page, simply modify that element of your doorway page, save the file, click on the Start button of the Page Critic Window and compare the statistics again. Do this until the statistics for all the elements of your doorway page are as close as possible to the statistics for the comparison page.

Step 8: Once you have created the doorway page for one keyword, follow steps 1 to 7 to create the doorway page for another keyword for the same search engine. Repeat this process for each of the keywords that you are targeting.

Wrapping things up:

If you remember, I had recommended that in order to locate the page which you should emulate, you should remove those sites which have been registered by The Open Directory and Yahoo!. Now, sometimes, it may so happen that all the top 20 sites have been registered by The Open Directory. In this case, of course, you would be left with no page to emulate. What you should do in this case is simple - don't remove the sites which have been registered by The Open Directory. Simply find the link popularity of each of the sites which are left after Step 3 and choose the page belonging to the site with the lowest link popularity.

Again, if you find that all the top 20 sites have been registered by Yahoo!, you should do the same thing - don't remove the sites which have registered by Yahoo!. Simply find the link popularity of the sites which are left after Step 2 and choose the page belonging to the site with the lowest link popularity.

Also, note that this process of creating doorway pages is not applicable for AOL, Lycos and Netscape because the top sites in these search engines are derived from The Open Directory. Hence, to get a high ranking in these search engines, you should get yourself listed by The Open Directory.

The doorway pages also don't work with MSN because the top sites in MSN are derived from LookSmart. Hence, to get a high ranking in MSN, you should get yourself listed in LookSmart