Search Engine Lab - Revenge of the Smart Pages

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Search Engine Lab

(Revenge of the Smart Pages)

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Audrey and I have been busy investigating new search engine and marketing strategies that show real potential. But the proof will be in the Qualified Traffic that they may (or may not) bring. So, we've been operating in quasi-Laboratory mode to see if a recent phenomena called Smart Pages can vault to the rarefied air of top search engine rankings.

A little background is in order.

You're going to find that once the internet marketing bug bites you, there's little that you can do to stop the craving for more, useful information. We've been bit and so we spend a LOT of money every month checking out new marketing resources that are being sold on the web.

One product that's been getting bunches of attention is called:

"The Whole Truth About Internet Marketing, Under Oath"

(http://www.the-whole-truth.com).

???

Okay, I'll bite. Free Site review for anyone that comes up with the most clever parody of that name

I bought it and read it cover to cover in one sitting. To be honest, I wasn't sure what I had with Stephen Pierce's Book. Some of his material was so audacious, I found it unsettling. And that's not necessarily a bad thing...

On the other hand, a good portion of it was remarkable.

Must.....Do......More.....Research.....Now.

Off I went to one of the internet marketing forums that I visit regularly (Terry Dean's Fabulous Net Breakthroughs. http://www.netbreaktroughs.com) and posted a question about "Under Oath" to the forum. Terry quickly responded that he thought the book was a good bit of material.

I'm getting off track. The point is, in the book was a section that talked about "Smart Pages", and that's the technique I wanted to experiment with.

In a nutshell, "Smart Pages' are designed to do only one thing - rank highly in Google for Niche Keyword phrases.

I went back to the web and did some more research to discover exactly how these Smart Pages work. After an hour or two, I did.

Smart Pages are also know as Doorway Pages. And if you don't know what that means, that's okay. I think I can explain it to you.

A Smart Page is a very small HTML web page with a Java Script re-direct. It is designed to be extremely keyword dense and relevant. Actually, "extremely" is an understatement. Keywords are really all a Smart Pages is made of.

These little pages use highly focused, keyword rich Meta Tags, Title Tags, Hyper Links, Alt Tags, Comment Tags, Image Names, and pseudo-page content all woven together in a complex series of complimentary hyperlinks to blow the webs off of the Google Search Engine spider- and ultimately, rank very high.

As a matter of fact, these pages are so keyword dense that they would be positively UGLY if a human ever caught sight of them.

So, they are never seen.

The technology behind the stealthy nature of a smart page is a little bit of code called a Java Script Re-direct.

You see, this whole technique hinges on the concept that the Smart Page will be crawled and indexed by the search engine spider, ranked highly and put into the search engine playing field.

Now, when someone actually finds that Smart Page in a search engine search, they will never see it. Why?

When they click the Smart Page link that the search engine returns, they are almost instantaneously transported to a page (Your Home Page or Product Page) that you specify in the Java Script code.

You see the link in Google, but you'll never actually see the Smart Page.

It's like a hyperlink wormhole.

The Basics:

Smart Pages are usually set-up and grouped together in sets of 10. Each page is named according to a keyword or keyword phrase that you'd like to get traffic from.

Stephen calls this grouping a "Family" of pages. Isn't that nice?

Anyway, this little Family of pages all link to one another, thereby increasing each family members (Smart Page's) link popularity, which is becoming more and more important for high ranking for search engines these days.

When you're done building your family, you'll end up with 10 pages that:

Are all named and contain a highly relevant search keyword.
Are all linked to each other.
Are fast loading.
And when they are clicked on in search engine's results, the java script will zoom the visitor to whatever page you specify (Your home page or store page).

I want to be clear. These pages contain only keywords, a small bit of text (pretty much useless filler material), links to one another and a link to your final destination page.

That's it. No sales copy, no pictures (as a matter of fact, the images don't exist, they are just referred to in the HTML and named according to your chosen keywords) and no layout.

If for some reason, the person that clicked on that Smart Page we're to experience some sort of loading delay, the Smart Page is designed in such a way that all the net surfer would see is a blank white background.

Think "Ninja"...

Our Execution:

The one thing that Audrey and I did NOT want to do was mess with Java Script in our Yahoo! Store. So we decided to experiment with this technique by using a little mini-site that we created just for this purpose.

We opened a hosting account with Newwebsite (http://www.newwebsite.com), chose their $29.99 plan so we could host up to 100 different domains and went to work.

Okay - Let's talk about me.

I am NOT a programmer and I have a short attention span. Java Script may as well be a recipe for coffee.

So there. What was I talking about?

Oh, So I took Stephen's little Smart Page Template (that came with the purchase of the book) into my copy of Microsoft FrontPage and started replacing the keywords from the template with our own relevant keywords. We used a combination of Overture and GoodKeywords to amass our little "Family" and I went to work.

I quit after about 20 minutes.

MAN, was this ever boring! As luck would have it, Armand Morin just released a little software program called "The Smart Page Generator" (http://www.spgenerator.com).

Yeah, I'm sure luck had something to do with it...Right. I've been on the guys mailing list for 9 months...

But, whatever the circumstances surrounding this coincidence, I took advantage of it and picked up a copy of Armand's Software.

Here's a little Screen Capture of the software.

All we had to do is enter the keywords we wanted Smart Pages generated from, tell the software the URL of the website where we were going to host the Smart Pages at, and finally tell the software where we wanted the re-directs sent to and hit "Create".

2 Seconds of Processing resulted in a little Family of Smart Pages.

I dragged the Smart Page Folder to the FrontPage site I was creating and published the files.

Tah Dah!

The Nitty Gritty

Now, this is whole process is NOT as cut and dried as it seems. There a couple of pitfalls that you need to avoid if you're going to attempt to use your own Smart Pages. They are not tricky, you just need to be aware of them.

1) The scuttlebutt around the internet is that these types of Doorway/Smart Pages could fall into ill-favor with the search engine spiders, resulting in web sites that could not be indexed by the search engines at all - let alone with a high ranking.

The potential for damage would be greatest if you published these pages in your Main Site or Yahoo! Store and then had the search engine ban you.

Eeek.

Solution:

We created a separate domain name and a separate mini-site to host the web pages. That way, if the search engines DID rank the site poorly, all we've lost is this little mini-site/hook page and NOT our Yahoo! Store's search engine ranking.

Here it is. Let's call it a Hook Page.

And as a straight-up Hook Page/Mini-Site, and it's designed to not only rank high because of the relevant keywords, content and meta tags, it's also Human Friendly.

But, hidden in the last "A Squared Armory" bolded text is a hyper link to link page where we had links to the Smart Pages

2) Why do you need a link to your Smart Pages?

Because you should, under no circumstance submit these Smart Pages to Google on their own. According to Stephen, they will not rank anywhere near as well as they would if a search engine found them by crawling through a link.

So, the only way for your Smart Pages to get crawled and Indexed by the search engines to to provide a link that the spiders can follow and find them naturally.

We created a link from the "A Squared Armory" text to another little page that contains hyper links to the Smart Pages.

Here it is. Let's call it the Link Page.

Now, notice the links to the Smart Pages? When a spider crawls these hyper links, the idea is that it will find the Smart Pages waiting for them, and index them according to their (hopefully high) relevancy.

3) Okay, but how do I get my Initial Hook Page crawled by a spider in the first place?

AhHa! The Six Hundred and Forty Two dollar question!

You've got 2 options here.

First, because our Main Hook Page is really a viable, Honest to Goodness site, it has a good chance of getting crawled by Google if we were to submit it to them.

You see, even though you're not supposed to submit Smart Pages directly to a search engine, we got around that limitation by creating a Hook Page that should get crawled with impunity. Not only that, this particular hook page may even get ranked well.

Second, if we wanted to expedite the process of our Hook Page getting crawled, we could simply place a hyper link to it from a site that we know has already been crawled by a search engine spider...

...Like our Yahoo! Store. So, we put some hyperlink text on a Home Page (Our Yahoo! Store) that linked to our Hook Page.

Every couple of days, the Google spider crawls around our Yahoo! Store, seeing what's new.

When it finds the hyperlink to the Hook Page, it will follow it.

Then, it will find the hidden text hyperlink on the Hook Page's home page, and it will follow it.

Then, the spider should run right smack into the Smart Page Hyperlinks and follow them to find...

10 Highly Optimized Smart Pages that all point pack to our Yahoo! Store.

The Set-Up.

The thought of creating a Hook Page from scratch just to test this technique did not sit well with me. So, I took the path of least resistance. I copied and pasted the homepage of our Yahoo! Store and altered the content and Meta tags to be a little different from that store.

This way, I saved myself some effort, and by changing the content and meta-tags of the Hook Page, the search engines will not penalize the Hook Page because the content is identical to our main Yahoo! Store.

All of this, including setting up the web hosting account, pointing our domain name (we had registered the variation of www.a2armory.com almost a year ago) to Newwebsites DNS servers, generating the smart pages, creating the hook page & its link page and publishing the whole shebang took just less than 2 hours.

Does it work?

I've seen both Stephen and Armand's Smart Page Search Engine results on Google.

They are always on the front page for the keywords that they're using for those smart pages.

Always.

It works for them.

I know that as of this evening, less than 24 hours after we published the site, that the sites have not yet been crawled by any search engine spiders.

So, there is no results to report yet.

But, there will be, and the moment there is, you're going to see one of 2 newsletter headlines from me:

"Smart Pages" - Einstein would be jealous!

"Smart Pages" - As Intelligent as a Bag of Hammers.

Stay Tuned!

Andy Jenkins

http://www.online-store-profits.com

Send your fan/hate mail to andy@online-store-profits.com

P.S. Due to overwhelming demand, in the next few weeks, Audrey and I will create a newsletter archive. This separate little page will contain links to our online newsletters for you to view at your leisure.