How a Long, Narrow Hallway Can Bring Visitors to Your Site
December 5, 1999
Have you considered adding a hallway to your web site? First, you will need a large supply of two by fours, some nails, a tape measure...wait, we're not talking about that kind of hallway. A "hallway" is the term that web promotion experts commonly use to describe a page that contains simple text based links to every single page in your web site. Many of you are probably thinking, "Wow, that's great, but what's the purpose?" To understand the benefit of a hallway page, first you must understand a little about how a search engine crawls, or indexes, your site.
Virtually every major search engine allows you to submit your page to their database so that their web spider can crawl your site and index its content. The spider "reads" nearly every element of your site, including page titles, text and even image descriptions. The spider sends this information back to the search engine to be categorized and added to the database. When users submit searches, the engine compares the words the user submitted to those in its database. If these words happen to match any of the information the spider sent back about your site, the search engine displays your site in its list of search results.
The best way for you to make sure that users find your site when they search is to make sure that every page in your site gets crawled by the spider. Since spiders rely on links from one page to another to crawl through a site, and not every page in your web site has a link to every other page, spiders sometimes "lose their way" before indexing your entire site. As a result, valuable portions of your site that might attract visitors are not in the search engine index and therefore visitors will not locate them even if searching for exactly the information you provide on your page.
To solve this problem, you can add a hallway page from which the spider can find every page in the site. Now when you submit your page to a search engine, you can point the engine directly at that page and the spider will happily crawl and index your full site.
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