Ranking highly with the search engines will bring in a significant amount of traffic to your web site. Search engines are the option of choice for web searchers looking for new content. But if you want to be truly successful online, you are going to have to go a bit farther than just the search engines. You are going to have to develop a marketing strategy.

Developing a marketing strategy for your online business is not that different from developing a marketing strategy for a freestanding "brick-and-mortar" business. The difference is simply that the Internet is an alternate environment, and as such, your communication options are different.

To that end, this section offers some brainstorming ideas for small and medium sized business, to get you out of the 'rut,' and move you toward innovative thinking about the marketing strategy for your web site.

Doorway pages are pages that have been developed to rank highly for a specific keyword or phrase. People visiting a doorway page as a result of a search engine query are presented with either a link to enter the main site or they are automatically redirected into the site.

Chances are that you have visited many babe and doorway pages and never even realized it. If the doorway pages are developed properly, they should blend into the main web site without the viewer being able to detect the difference.

Doorway pages are not generally considered spam by the search engines when they are used appropriately. However, there is a growing trend by search engine providers to view them with more skepticism. Nevertheless, doorway pages can actually increase the accuracy of the search engine index if they are used responsibly.

Take for example, a company which sells 100 products online. It is impossible for the company to optimize one page to cover all 100 products across all the different search engines. Each engine is different. However, by creating doorway pages the company can create entry points to their site which focus on keyword phrases for their specific products. They may go even one step further, and make a doorway page for each search engine.

A doorway page contains all of the elements associated with any other babe and web page. The only difference is that the title, keywords, description, and body content have all been optimized for one specific keyword or keyword phrase.

Typically, however, doorway pages don't contain complex table layouts, extensive JavaScript, or a lot of images. File sizes should be kept low - 45K and below. Remember, you are creating this page to specifically rank highly with a search engine for a specific keyword phrase - not to dazzle the viewer with design.