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Portal Websites
by Dave Davies
http://www.stepforth.com
The use of mini websites (also known as portals) as a
search engine placement tool is a hotly debated topic and
one which is sure to bring up warnings of "spamming" and
raise a few eyebrows at the legitimacy. Portals have, for
too long, been used as an easy link-building tool offering
nothing more than regurgitated information, sometimes
vaguely reworded, for the sole purpose of building links
to some central website.
The search engines themselves have long been aware of this
tactic and have made every effort to hinder its
usefulness. Looking for duplicate content, interlinking
strategies, and an assortment of other similar indicators,
search engines have generally managed to reduce the
usefulness of portal websites as a link-building tactic to
nothing.
Then have portal websites been rendered useless? The
answer, a resounding "no".
A benefit to the actual visitor!
As with all website design, the best possible use of any
tactic, including portals, is to help your visitors. If
you make your information easy to find and relevant to
what they are looking for, your visitors will stay for
longer, view more pages, and perhaps even return. Portals
are an excellent tool for consolidating information into
smaller, more manageable sources of information.
Let us take for example a athletics information website.
Being an excellent source of information for sports around
the world, this site has it all. Basketball, Soccer,
Hockey, Rugby, and on and on. The advantage for the
website is that it has tons of great information on all
the major sports, the disadvantage ~ it has TONS of
information on ALL the major sports. So what can one do
to help the visitor find the information that they are
looking for?
The answer here ~ build portal websites. In the case of
this athletic site it could be done by either region or by
sport. Let's say that you choose to build portal sites by
sport. What this would give the visitor is a much more
specific site to navigated, dedicated to their area of
interest. Most certainly you should carefully link this
site to the other sports sites to insure that a visitor
with multiple athletic interests can find all the
information that they need but for the visitor only
searching out information on one sport they will land on
pages with tons on information on that sport dedicated to
exactly what they are looking for.
Too often people optimizing websites focus on the spiders
and forget about the visitors. The sites you are
developing have to appeal to the visitors and provide them
with the information that they're looking for or all
you'll get at the end of the day is hosting bills and low
conversion rates. Portal websites are a great tool for
this in that they enable you to create a series of
information resources giving full information on an area
while structuring a network of information covering a much
larger topic.
And more keywords too !
While the visitor is of very significant importance when
building a website or, as we are discussing here, a
network of sites ~ getting visitors to your site is of
primary significance too. As we all know, there's no
point in creating a beautiful website if no one's going to
see it. Portal websites are a fantastic tool for
increasing your online visibility and search engine
exposure for a wide variety of reasons.
Perhaps the most significant of these reasons is the
increase in keywords that you can target in a portal
promotion. Rather than having one website with which to
target a broad range of keywords you now have many
websites with which you can target these same keywords
(more effectively) and also add others. Rather than
trying to target "super bowl" and "hockey history" on the
same site you now have the opportunity to target them
specifically on sites dedicated to the keywords for the
sport in question.
To illustrate: on one page it is much easier to target the
two keyword phrases "hockey playoffs" and "hockey scores"
than "hockey playoffs" and "football rules". In the first
example you are using one keyword for two searches and
thus, make the job much easier that when you have two
totally different keyword phrases. Targeting incompatible
keyword phrases (i.e. ones that aren't based on the same
main keyword) makes it harder to get the words in that you
need to and still keep the content readable to the visitor.
Another related advantage to portal sites is based on the
weight that many search engines give to home pages. For
obvious reasons, some search engines put increased weight
on home pages. With a portal promotion you have as many
home pages as you do websites and thus, you have the
advantage of increased weight being placed on pages
directly relating to the searches your visitors are
finding you with and by which you want them to find you.
And when they get there they will find the exact
information that they are looking for.
The added ability to list multiple websites on
directories, and to build far more links to your network
will also serve you well. With sites dedicated to
specific areas (sports in this example) you can then go to
a directory and list you hockey portal in it's category
(Directory > Recreation > Sports > Hockey - in yahoo) and
then move on to list your soccer portal at Directory >
Recreation > Sports > Soccer. This gives you the ability
to build far more links to your websites overall and to
focus your search engine placement tactics. What I mean
by focus is that you can determine (either through
research or experience) which sports are of the greatest
interest to your visitors and focus on placement for that
sport. Rather than building links for one domain and
relying on it to rank for often-unrelated keyword phrases,
you can decide that soccer and tennis (for example) are
the two sports whose visitors buy the most products from
your site. You can then go on a large link-building
mission for your soccer and tennis portals looking for
links, not just sports-related, but soccer and tennis-
related. This makes your incoming links far more relevant
and also enables you to ask for links from sites that may
not otherwise link to you. A site that reports scores on
soccer in Europe is more likely to link to your soccer
portal than to a site about sports in general. Or you can
ask them for a link to both sites (your soccer portal and
your main site) and kill two birds with one stone.
Conclusion
While the glory days of blatant link-farming are over,
portal websites have never been more relevant. The
ability to target a much broader range of keywords, to
attain incoming links from a much larger base of websites,
and to carefully link between these portals can take your
site from 50 visitors/day to 5000 if done properly.
A word of caution: you are going to see these websites
that you've created and you're going to want to maximize
your link popularity ~ so what are you going to do. Well
for one thing, you're not going to link all of your sites
to all of the others with some link-farm footer at the
bottom of every page. You're probably not going to want
to even link all of them to the others on a "Links Page".
What you will want to do is interlink them in an
intelligent way. When there is a time when you may want
your visitors to go to another of your sites (going from
one sport to another), or where you may want them to have
that choice, that's when to link ~ not just because you
want to add more links.
As with most issues in web design, keep it friendly and
attractive for your visitors. If what you are about to do
to increase your search engine placement does not enhance
the experience for your human visitors then it's probably
a strategy that either won't work or which will be
penalized down the road.
This article courtesy of ...
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