O.K. Boys and girls, it's time to put on your skeptics hat and join me in a little cynicism here. There's no way that a simple technique like "Doorway Pages" can work to improve your search engine ranking on specific search words or phrases. If it were so easy, everyone would do it and then nobody would benefit. I've heard those stories about sites vaulting to number one position on the search engines
and they're bogus! Pure unadulterated bovine manure!
  
 Yowee! That was what I was saying just last week because my rankings were in the basement. My weekly reports from "PositionAgent" consistently had all my keywords showing up as a big ugly zero on all the search engines they monitor.
I was beginning to believe I'd never rank in the top 10 on any search. That's what I was expecting when my "SearchEngine-Monitor" report showed up this week. Then I nearly swallowed my heart, because I suddenly found it in my throat!

 There it was, listed number three (3!) on AltaVista under the search phrase "e-commerce tutorial" and just to verify that position, I've been back tonight to see where I rank and I've dropped to number five! But guess what? Now I have TWO sites in the top 10 at AltaVista, both of them doorway pages I created to help improve my ranking there. I thought, O.K., no harm in trying it to see if it works. But never in over a million years did I expect to get TWO PAGES IN THE TOP TEN RANKING for ANY search phrase.

 I bet you're thinking, "Sure you did Mike" I invite you to take a look yourself! Go to http://www.altavista.com and type "e-commerce tutorial" in the search box and click the search button. It may change position tomorrow, but I'm there today and even took a screen shot to prove it! Do you think I'm at all excited? You bet your life I am!
 
 Now, top ten ranking for one obscure search phrase is not the magic bullet for success. But do you think I'm going to be cynical about doorway pages any more? Not likely. Instead I've begun to pay close attention to what works for whom. Why? you ask? Because this same doorway page gets me that same big ugly zero ranking in the other search engines and I made number 34 on "WebCrawler" with my home page, proof that honest content and good page design with proper keyword metatags will accomplish things without "trickery".

 This particular doorway page works only for AltaVista and only today. They'll no doubt change their algorithms and lose me altogether tomorrow. I'll be looking for ways to improve results at Excite and AOLnetfind now. I do this for my clients and work toward success for each of them. If you want to try it yourself, hop over to http://submitplus.bc.ca where you'll find the AltaVista effective doorway page
template that I used to create my high-ranking pages!

 I don't want to resort to different doorway pages for all my thirty web pages for each different search engine. But I will use every resource I can find to succeed honestly in this business. If it works, don't break it!