There are numerous high-powered .asp web sites in cyberspace, but not many are getting positioned into the major search engines. Marketing consultants and web designers have clients with .asp site costs exceeding $100,000, so it's necessary to employ techniques that allow users to find these pages in engine databases. Paul explains how .asp sites can get listed in major engines by creating viewable doorway pages written in clusters known as nodes.
There are numerous high-powered .asp web sites in cyberspace, but many are not getting positioned into the major search engines. Marketing consultants and web designers have clients with .asp site costs exceeding $100,000, so it’s necessary to employ techniques that allow users to find these pages in engine databases.
Mike Grehan at Design Works writes, “I need to know how best to advise my .asp clients re: search engine positioning.” Several others have written or called with similar requests. The only engine that appears to have some compatibility with .asp sites is AltaVista.
To deal with positioning .asp web sites, most Internet marketing technology and search engine optimization firms are limited to running an off-site positioning campaign by hosting additional domain names with viewable or nonviewable product pages designed to attract the engines. This can be a very effective technique for dealing with .asp sites, and it’s commonly known as creating and submitting doorway pages.
In the past, I’ve described any page modified for the purpose of search engine optimization as a doorway page. Regardless of whether it’s a subpage of your web site, an additional page added to your site, or an additional page hosted off-site, once modified for the engines, these pages are always referred to as doorway pages. They are also known by other names, including gateway pages or splash pages.
Viewable doorways, or modified subpages (hosted within a client’s primary domain name), are often written in clusters known as nodes. Viewable doorways can also be hosted off-site and managed by a search engine optimization firm so adjustments can be made from time to time. Nonviewable doorways hosted off-site are usually managed with an IP delivery system known as cloaking or redirect pages.
Viewable and nonviewable pages modified for purposes of search engine optimization can be very effective in positioning .asp web sites in the major engines. It is the actual modifications of HTML tags and the content within the tags that help a page receive good positioning. The craft of modifying these pages is a challenge. Then it takes proper submission techniques to properly deliver the pages.
Microsoft/Active Server Page (ASP) web sites actually have three major hurdles to overcome:
Recently, Ian Ippolito of Planet Source Code described an excellent tool for converting dynamic ASPs into a search engine-compatible format. It’s a little-known product Ian bumped into called XQASP. Apparently, it converts the parameters of dynamic ASPs into a search engine- compatible format.
For example, on Planet Source Code, the URL for a piece of code might look like this:
http://www.planet-source-code.com/vb/scripts/ShowCode.asp
?lngWId=3&txtCodeId=769
Below, it is shown as search engine-readable (all “?” and “&” and “=” signs are replaced):
http://www.planet-source-code.com/xq/ASP/txtCodeId.769/
lngWId.3/qx/vb/scripts/ShowCode.htm
The next step is to use search engine optimization techniques to modify the HTML tags and content within the tags, and then submit all pages according to each search engine’s submission criteria.
As you know, all the search engines have different submission criteria. Google will only accept 2 documents per day, AltaVista will accept 5 per day, and Inktomi will accept 300 per day. It is very important to pay attention to these criteria. Do not mass submit your pages to the engines; it will cause you a lot of trouble.
Be careful if you use submitter software. Unless you have a large IT staff with time, knowledge, and the capability of making frequent search engine optimization modifications, your best option may be to consider finding a search engine optimization specialist who can manage all these issues, giving you a turnkey solution.
