High Search Engine Ranking - Information Pages

* By Terry Plank, Director of Marketing for Academy of Web Specialists

What are Information Pages?

An Information Page is simply a page that targets a particular keyword phrase that is also search engine friendly. These pages act as "doorways" to the rest of the content of your site, without having to redesign or modify content in your current pages. These pages can help in achieveing high search engine ranking. A doorway can be used for many different reasons.

• To optimize for an "appropriate" keyword phrase that the text of your site can't accomplish adequately.
• To provide good text pages for a site that uses Flash or graphics instead of good text pages.
• To explain to a specific SE that you are relevant for a particular keyword search, appealing to the particular idiosyncrasies of each search engine's algorithms.

Let me explain more fully. A good Web site is designed to attract visitors to the site and influence them in ways you hope will inform or cause them to respond. However, what's good for communicating with people is not always good for communicating with a search engine.

If you have a Web site that relies primarily on graphics and uses little text, uses a database and creates dynamically generated pages, has highly competitive keyword phrases, or that deals with a wide variety of general topics, chances are that your pages will rank poorly on search engine rankings.

This creates a serious dilemma. How do you make Web pages that are both pleasing, useful, and logical to humans, that work for your development and maintenance of the site AND that presents your keywords to SE's in such a way that they will recognize the relevancy of your page for these keyword phrases.

You can keep your current Web site just like it is and create Information Pages, each optimized to rank well for a different keyword in a different engine. Sometimes, when targeting 10 keywords across 5 search engines, you can end up with 50 Information Pages to improve your search engine ranking. Don't worry, it isn't spamming the SE's as long as your Information Pages are appropriate, professional and ethically done.

In this article I used the term "Information Page". In the past "doorway pages" were a commonly accepted term, but because they were used unethically, they have taken on negative press! Doorway pages are out, Information Pages are in as a necessary and ethical practice of gaining findability and ranking for valuable, relevant keyword phrases.