The problem is that doorway pages and splash pages are easily confused, and where splash pages are bad for SEO – doorway pages are used by black hat SEO companies to devastating effect; usually with the results of a website being penalised.

Most companies would come across a splash page as an innocent part of website design. There was a strong trend for corporate sites to feature a splash page as a sort of foyer, a way of introducing and impressing the Internet user.

The doorway of doom

Doorway pages came to be on the SEO bad list with the usual story. Spammers noticed that the search engines paid lots of attention to the opening page of a site, and to any page that was heavily optimised, and maximised on this by jamming keywords into doorway pages – splash pages included. Internet users would click on the resulting listing for their keyword, but be drawn through the doorway and redirected to the spam site. Essentially, doorway pages were used to kidnap Internet users and fling them into websites they had no interest in visiting.

This was only one of the misuses of doorway pages. SEO companies also used them to rank for keywords as well, without ‘kidnapping’ users. These pages would then be used to link to other sites to improve their rankings. The search engines came to view them as a menace.

Why you should let your doorway pages go

If your splash page is a genuine page on your site, not being used for SEO purposes, you might well decide to hang on to it. A lot of design goes into splash pages – which cannot be thrown away lightly.

However, there are more than SEO reasons to let go of your splash page, if you have one. Although there is a risk that your page will annoy the search engines, the risk that it will annoy your site’s users is even stronger. A lot of SEO focuses on increasing usability, and splash pages diminish it.

This isn’t the first time that Facebook has achieved more traffic than Google either, as it hit the top spot on January 1st 2010, Christmas Day 2009 and New Year’s Eve 2009 – with its users wishing their friends family season’s greetings.

Since the same period last year, Facebook’s share of web traffic has increased by a staggering 185%. Google meanwhile has only enjoyed a paltry increase of 9%.

Does this mean Google’s crown is slipping and Facebook is the new king of the Internet? Does this mean that advertisers should shut down their Google Adwords accounts and start using Facebook’s PPC system? Does it mean Bing will creep up on the blindside and pass Google, as the once great behemoth’s tyres are flat?

No, of course not. It means that people use Facebook…a lot. It means that people check Facebook several times each day, and many of Facebook’s 400 million plus users can’t go a day without seeing who poked them and what’s happening on their fun wall.

People use Facebook for communicating with friends, which naturally means they’ll come back to it as their friends reply. Google however is used to find stuff out – and as you find stuff out on Google very quickly, you don’t really need to revisit it again and again.

If Google were only interested in achieving page impressions, so its advertisers could achieve ad impressions, it wouldn’t be quite so effective at matching results with users’ queries. It would draw the whole process out a bit, like Bing does. Then Google’s share of web traffic might go up… temporarily until people started to use a more effective search engine.

The latest Facebook viral campaign to hit the headlines was from Mike Affinito, who created a Facebook page that promised that his sister would name her new baby Megatron, the bad guy from the Transformers, if he could get over one million fans of the page before the child was born.

Even though he gave himself several months to achieve this feat, it was accomplished in under two weeks! At the time of writing, there are just under 1.5 million fans of the page!

Whether this Facebook page is real, and Mike is indeed a real person with a real sister, with a real impending child named Megatron, is another matter. This could well be another Internet marketing company using Facebook for their own ends, looking to create a huge database of people. What makes us suspicious is that this isn’t the first time that someone has promised to name their child Megatron if a certain number of fans have been attracted to a page on Facebook – and last time it was just 100,000 to join a group.

Whether it is real or not, the fact remains that as an Internet marketing ploy Facebook is highly effective and shouldn’t be ignored in any SEO campaign.

It’s hard to find the right domain name. Often, the one you want is taken. If you’re after a domain that is an exact match to your main keyword, you’re likely to have to bargain for it with a current owner, which can prove very costly. Not every business can afford to do this. In that case, you need to have a few more options.

Reworking a domain name

If you miss out on the domain you want, it is possible to come up with one that is almost as good. In fact, it’s much better to have a list of domains you could be happy with when you first go domain hunting. When you go looking for a domain, here are some things to consider:

• Keep it short. ‘Icanrememberthisdomain.com’ may be cute, but ‘rememberthisdomain.com’ is a little easier for Internet users to type into the address bar.
• Keep your keywords in mind. It’s a good idea to have at least one of your keywords in your domain name. Having a keyword worked in at this level makes your search engine optimisation efforts to relate your pages to keywords a little easier. It must be a keyword you will use in the long term.
• Keep it memorable. Your site address is the first clue the Internet user has to your business identity. If they click through and find that your site RememberThisDomain.com isn’t about how to remember a domain name, but about looking at old houses, they’ll click back.

A lot of the work in search engine optimisation takes place on your own pages. This is great because your pages are a place you can control, unlike links on other websites. Many companies put off their off-page SEO work to the last minute because it involves forces outside of their control. There is an area in between which is key to getting your organic traffic rates up. Your title and description tags, which are listed in the top area of your website’s code, are what it takes to convince Internet users to click on your links from search engine results pages.

Title tag

This tag will be the first thing that internet users see on the search pages, so it needs to represent your page effectively. It also needs to be short, as you have restricted room, and contain your keywords for your SEO. Writing title tags is a specialist skill, and it can help to talk to your SEO company as they will know the best way to create titles tags.

Description tag

The second thing Internet users focus on is the description below the title in the SERPs (search engine results pages). This should be used to provide more information about what your page contains.

The number of people who choose your site in the listings could also have an impact on the future ranking of your site. There is a school of SEO thought that the search engines are beginning to take notice of which sites get organic traffic, and work this into their algorithms. Certainly, with customised search patterns in Google, the more a user clicks on your links – the higher your website will appear to that user for other searches. So, a better organic traffic level means not only good things for your site now, but in the future.

The term is quite an evocative one. You read it, and your thoughts immediately dart to images of tasty banquets of links, of sustenance, of rich life-giving liquids. All of these images are apt ones, because links really do give your site the nourishment it needs to succeed with the search engines.

Link juice is, essentially, a way to describe the value of a link that is being given to your site; any inbound link has some worth to your site. However, some inbound links are more worthwhile than others. If a site has no connections, a low ranking on all of its pages, and no reputation, then the link it provides will be low on link juice. If the site providing the link has great rankings and its own quality links, it’s got a lot of link juice.

The term is also used to talk about potential for creating links. Some campaigns are thought to generate more link juice than others. This means that they have great linking potential. A good linking campaign should aim to get you as many links as possible in one effort.

It’s important to keep an eye out for potential link juice in all of your online activities. This catchy term is a part of what will make your SEO campaign a success and get those rankings that your website needs.

The term here is ‘linkbait’. It’s a term that Internet marketers originally used to refer to anything that is likely to generate links. The idea is to create something magnetically interesting, set it out on the waves of the Internet, and wait for the links to come streaming in and bite.

The term itself isn’t hugely popular, mainly because it seems so callous. Some search engine optimisation experts don’t like potential linkers being viewed as prey. The term does describe the process very aptly, but it’s true that it might be misleading. Bait can often be any old thing, but good linkbait needs to be of the highest quality, and a lot of serious thought needs to go into its creation.

Good linkbait needs to be planned carefully. One of the vital things to keep in mind when creating linkbait is the needs of your target user group. You might come up with the funniest viral video in the world, but if your site’s target users don’t visit YouTube, your effort is wasted. Linkbait needs to answer an unnamed need in your market to be really effective.

It can help to get a professional consultant on board when devising linkbait and other linking strategies. You can talk to our expert staff at StuckOn about this area of SEO. The best link building campaigns are smart, creative, and have a unique angle. Make sure your linkbait is only of the best quality if you wish to catch the biggest links in the pond.

There’s no use wallowing about the link that got away, and what size its PR was!

One of the adverts showed a woman in a train station asking a man which tube she should take for Euston Station, where the man promptly offered every piece of information relating to Euston Station… save for what she asked.

The idea of the advert is that if you use Bing, instead of say, Google, you’ll cut out all of the useless information and get straight to the nub of the matter.

But will you?

We asked Google and Bing exactly that question, which tube is it for Euston Station?

You’d think, seeing as Microsoft are making such a fuss over how their search engine gives answers, rather than ‘information overload’, they’d have made sure that the answer to this question was succinct and accurate… you’d think.

Here is what Google offered:

Wikipedia is first and second, goes without saying. The third result is AllinLondon.co.uk – which offers loads of info, but not necessarily the answer to our question. Fourth up is metazone.co.uk – which has the answer in great detail, showing how we can plan our route. Nice one Google, third site, fourth result down had the answer.

Here is what Bing offered, despite being the question asked in a multi-million pound advertising campaign:

First two again are Wikipedia results, same as Google. Next is AllinLondon.co.uk again, same as Google. Not much difference so far, the same information overload. The fourth result is another page for AllinLondon.co.uk, showing restaurants near Euston – not really what we asked, but nice to know.

The fifth result is alwaystouchout.com, which shows us development projects in London. We’re getting a bit off track now. We’re then offered davros.org, which shows us a history of London Underground lines… after this we gave up.

So, which search engine answered the question in a succinct manner? Google. Which search engine offered reams of information that failed to answer our question? Bing.

Nice one Microsoft, may as well have just shot your own foot while you were at it. Here’s the advert anyway, in case you think we’ve made this up.