Portals was a term first used on the Internet around the time of the dotcom boom, and described websites like Yahoo and AOL that featured loads of information in one place. They would offer news, funny stories, access to your email, videos (albeit very grainy and slow loading at the time) as well as other information – including a search facility.
However the bubble soon burst, and portals became a thing of the past, cast aside as something of a failure. The huge amounts of money spent on Internet advertising, much of it going on portals, dried up as the return on investment (ROI) simply wasn’t there.
Most Internet businesses haven’t given the notion of a portal a second’s thought since then, but we have…
The return of the portal
You see, the Internet has come full circle and Google, in its infinite wisdom, wants to offer its users the most comprehensive information it can for any search query. Google does this because it knows that people who use Google want to find relevant information quickly. The more accurate results Google offers, the more people will use it over Yahoo! and Bing.
Therefore Google wants to offer up websites that are rich with news, features and info regarding a given subject; the types of websites that StuckOn knows how to build and promote.
By building, and owning your own portal you’re able to rank for longtail search queries that you would struggle to rank for with your own website, and control advertising space and traffic in a way you wouldn’t have thought possible. With a portal you can write about aspects of your industry that you couldn’t on your own website, including your competitors. With a portal you can rank for searches relating to your competitors, you can earn links from websites that would never link to your own website and by becoming accepted as a Google News Publisher with your portal you can make the site even stronger.
By building a successful portal you can own the sort of website that you would normally pay to advertise on, and even use it as a lead generator for your own website. With a portal, and your own website, you can occupy multiple places on the first page of Google for searches.
Don’t just rank for search queries, control them.
