How to create a legitimate portal

December 19, 2003

(Updated from my original article published May 15, 2003)

Corporate informational portals have been in use for quite some time. As the name implies, they were designed to help their users and to provide valuable information. There can also be many additional benefits when the subject of optimization of search engines is concerned. The use of "auxiliary websites", also described as portals, when used as search engine positioning tools is a controversial subject in many circles.

Some will tell you it is spamming and when the topic is brought up, it generally raises some eyebrows as to the legitimacy or basis of their use.

For many years now, some informational portals have been used as an easy link referring "instrument" offering basically what constitutes "recycled" information. However, powerful search engine algorithms in use today enable them to detect, with a fair amount of accuracy, the existence of such portals. Most look for mirror sites and duplicate content, others are trying to determine if heavy cross-linking techniques have been used.

Generally speaking, some search engines have managed to reduce the value of portal websites as a link-building technique to almost zero. So many of you must be asking- is it still worth it? Why bother going through all the expense and trouble of making a portal website if search engines ignore them?

This article will show you how to build a "legitimate" portal that will:

     Help your users find additional, updated and useful content
     Improve the ranking of your main site in the search engines

Most importantly, it will show you how to do it correctly, using only approved SEO techniques and without risking any of your current rankings. The first, most important step is to make your information relevant to your main topic and to make it easy to find. This will go a long way in offering useful and valuable information for your visitors and will create repeat traffic.

In the business world, portals are excellent tools for consolidating valuable information into smaller and easier to manage sources of information. Such portals are becoming very popular today.

Lets take the example of a website that offers information on how to better invest in the real estate market. If the site is already an excellent source of information for the real estate market in a given region or geographical location, the site is most probably very popular and could be considered as an authority in its field. One main advantage for that site is that it offers lots of useful information on the important subject of how to carefully invest in land, houses, condominiums and maybe even commercial office buildings.

However, such a large site has a major disadvantage in that it has a lot of information on all the major subjects of investing in ALL areas of the real estate market, but fails to specialize in just one or two very segmented markets that could very well apply to that specific geographical location or region. With a carefully planned and well-designed portal website, using this example, it could become a great auxiliary site that could specialize in one specific area, say first home buying.

A person looking for information on the careful selection of a new office building wouldn't be interested in learning how to buy his first home. This is what is meant by relevant information.

Additionally, and to further extend the power of portal websites, in the case of our real estate informational site, it could be done by either region or by individual city, especially if it's a fairly large one. Such a portal site would give a visitor much more specific information to navigate and would be specific to their area of interest. To be successful, you would need to link this portal site to the other larger real estate website to insure that a visitor with multiple real estate interests can find all the information that he or she needs.

To carry this one step further, for the visitor that needs information on how and where to buy land in that area, another portal site could be created where that visitor could go to and find land or certain lots that are available for building in that city. It is our experience that, too often, people optimizing websites focus mostly on the search engine crawlers, Page Rank, link popularity and such that in the end, they manage to somehow forget about the real visitors!

Any website, be it the main site or a portal, needs to appeal to the real "human" visitors and supply them with the specific information that is valuable and of use to them. Failure to deliver on that will result in very low or non-existent conversion rates and a loss of time and resources.

When carefully designed and implemented, portal websites can be powerful tools for this in that they enable you to create a series of information resources giving full information, but on a specific area, while at the same time structuring a vast network of information covering a much larger subject that will be very valuable to your real visitors.

As shown in the two preceding paragraphs, while the visitor is of great importance when carefully planning and building a website or a network of sites and portals, getting visitors to discover your site and then visiting it is of primary consideration too. After all, it would be a complete waste of time and resources to build a great-looking website or network of sites if no one can ever find it.

As you are about to discover, portal websites are a very powerful way to significantly increase your search engine exposure and your online visibility for a wide variety of reasons.

One of the most important reasons is the large increase and improvement in the number of keywords and key phrases that you can effectively target in a portal network. Instead of having just one website with which to specifically target a very broad range of keywords and key phrases, you now have many websites with which you can more effectively target these important and specific keywords.

Rather than trying to target commercial office buildings and how to buy your first house on the same site, you now have the flexibility to target them individually on websites that will be specifically dedicated to the exact keywords and key phrases for these individual and in a way, unrelated subjects. We will also add that another very important advantage to portal sites is based on the weight and significance that most major search engines give to home pages. After all, the homepage is usually the most important page in any website.

With a portal implementation, you have as many home pages as you do websites! In such a scenario, you have the added advantage of significantly increased weight being placed on pages that are relevant and targeted to the searches matched by your visitors. Obviously, when they find that highly relevant page and visit it, they will find the exact information that they are looking for.

One final word of caution
In the beginning of the Internet, webmasters and site owners would do just about everything imaginable and get away with it on most occasions. Today, the major search engines have developed very sophisticated technology and complex algorithms that can potentially detect "mirror sites" and duplicate content. While the golden days of link farms and suspicious linking strategies are over, corporate and informational portal websites are increasingly more and more relevant.

The ability and flexibility to target a much broader range of keywords and key phrases, to capture incoming links from a much larger base of websites and to carefully link between these portals can significantly increase the quantity and quality of visitors, if done properly.

However, to be real effective and to do this in the most conservative way, don't link all of your sites to all of the others with some link-farm strategy on the side or at the bottom of every page. Don't even link all of them to the others on a links or partners page. Instead, interlink them in a careful, structured fashion. Most major search engines today will penalize websites that are heavily interlinked or worse, that are cross linked together.

Carefully structure your pages that when the time comes when you want your visitors to go to another of your portal websites, that is the perfect time when to link- not simply because you want to increase the number of links on any given site. As with any other issue in quality and careful web design, keep it as user-friendly as possible and attractive for your visitors, not just in the way the site looks, but in terms of ease of navigation and the general informational content that is available on that specific website or portal.

Conclusion
When designing or implementing any portal strategy, corporate or otherwise, if what you are about to do to improve your search engine positioning does not truly enhance the experience or usefulness for your human visitors, then it's most likely a strategy that will either fail to work or worse, which could penalize some or all of your websites and portals at some future time.

The onus is on you or on your search engine optimization company in using conservative and approved methods of building websites and portals that will truly satisfy both your visitors and the search engines.

Article written by Serge Thibodeau,
President & CEO,
Rank for $ales
Copyright (c) Serge Thibodeau 2003

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