However, because search engine operators need to be cautious about portals that are nothing more
than SEO spam, your job in optimizing your site if it’s a portal is a little harder. As with all web-site
design, the best objective for your site, even for a portal, is to help your visitors achieve a desired
result, whether that’s purchasing a product, signing up for a newsletter, or finding the desired information.
If you make using your site easy and relevant, your site visitors will stay on your site longer,
view more pages, and return to your site in the future. Portals help you reach these goals by acting
as excellent tools for consolidating information into smaller, more manageable sources of information
that users find easier to use and digest.
Too often people optimizing web sites 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 web sites
enable you to create a series of information resources giving full information on any given topic while
structuring a network of information covering a much larger scope.
Though the visitor is of significant importance when building a web site, the site itself is of primary
significance, too. There’s no point in creating a beautiful web site if no one’s going to see it, and portals
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 use in portal
promotion. Rather than having one web site with which to target a broad range of keywords, portals
allow you to have many web sites, each of which can have its own set of keywords. For example,
instead of trying to put “deer hunting” and “salt-water fishing” on the same page, you can create a
hunting portal that allows you to have separate sites for deer hunting, salt-water fishing, and any
other type of hunting activity that you would like to include.
On one page it is much easier to target the two keyphrases “deer season” and “Mississippi hunting
license” than it is to target two keyphrases like “deer season” and “marlin fishing.” Targeting
incompatible keywords or phrases — that is, keywords or phrases that aren’t related to a larger
topic — makes it harder to have both readable, relevant content and to reach the keywords that
you need to use.
There are other advantages to creating web portals, as well. Having a portal allows you to have
multiple home pages, which can give you the opportunity to create sites that consistently appear in
top ranking. You also have more sites to include in your other SEO strategies, and more places to
include keywords. However, there is a fine line between a useful portal and one that causes search
engines to turn away without listing your portal on SERPs.
As with most issues in web design, keep it user-friendly and attractive. If you have any doubt that the
actions you’re taking with your site or the design methods that you’re using could lead to negative
results for the SEO of your site, don’t use them. If you’re feeling that a strategy won’t work, it probably
won’t, and you’re wasting your time if you insist on using a design you’re not comfortable with.
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