Improve Your Ranking In Altavista Search Engine

Ranking Web Pages

When you search with AltaVista, the engine quickly sorts through the millions of pages in its database and provides you with the closest matches. The matches are ranked, so that the most relevant ones come first.

AltaVista ranks websites in two ways:

1. Location & Frequency of Keywords
   • Keywords in the title.
   • Keywords near the top of the page i.e. headers or headlines.
   • Frequency of keywords in the body of the page.
     
     
2. AltaVista is one of the few search engines which also uses META tags (description tag & keyword tag) for obtaining higher relevancy from websites.

Pick Your Keywords

• Think of the words you would use to find a site like yours and list them in order of importance.
• Ask others what words they would use to find your website and list them in order of importance (the most important ones match up with yours).
• Use these keywords to make a search. Do the words bring up a site like yours?
• Check out your main competitors' sites and see what keywords they use in their META tags (if any). You can check their tags by going to view on the menu bar on your browser and click source. This will bring up the HTML code for that page. They will be at the top of the page within the section and will say something like:
  meta name="KEYWORDS" content="competitors, keywords."

Proper use of the Title Tags

• The TITLE tag is not a META tag. What you put in this tag will appear in the title bar at the top of every browser being used to view your site. This TITLE tag will also become the hyper-link to your site within the search engine results listings.
• The TITLE tag is one of the most important search points so it often helps to include your top keyword/keywords phrase(s) here. Don't use words like 'Welcome to' or 'home page', they waste valuable space. Do not overload this tag with keywords, it won't attract visitors. Finally, only use keywords relevant to that page of the site.
• Do not use ALL CAPS, your site may become less relevant as most people do not search in all caps.
• Keep the TITLE tag short - 72 characters of text or less works best. Never put a URL into the title. Search engines will often skip you entirely if you do.

Proper use of the META Tag for Keywords

• Be specific with your keywords. The object is NOT to make your site searchable under every keyword under the sun. Rather, the idea is to make your site relevant to specific keyword searches for your industry.
• Be careful with repetition of keywords. AltaVista will give you a "spam penalty" and rank you lower on a keyword if you repeat that word or phrase too close to itself (i.e. travel, travel, travel), spread them out, about 3 words or more apart.
• Don't overdo it. The more keywords you use, the more you dilute the relevancy for every word and phrase in the list.
• AltaVista is case-sensitive so will not look for words in lower case if there is a capital letter in it.
• Use keywords in their plural as the site has a better chance of being considered relevant to searches on both singular and plural.

Proper use of the META tag for Description

• Most importantly, the description tag is NOT the keywords tag. The content of this tag is the only description you will get for your website. You want a good description that will convince a person to click on your site before another.
• Short but sweet works best. If your description is too long, it may be cut off in the middle of a sentence.

Tips And Tricks:

Keywords should be in the title, meta tags. 

Keywords appear frequently in the document(Should Not Be Overdone!!). 

Keywords should appear on top of the document.

Keywords should be close to each other in the document.

Use keywords in the ALT= position of your IMG SRC. 

Rare words in a query are weighted more heavily than common words For Example Word - "goat" will be considered rare in comparison to word "animal").

AltaVista is also case sensitive. this means is that if you do a search for "free money" and then another for "Free Money" the results would be different. So try and get both the upper and lower case version of your keyword in the document text.

These things are considered as Spam by Altavista

Pages that only contain links to other sites.

Pages that are too small.

Pages with off-topic or excessive keywords. 

Duplication of content, by excessive submission of the same page, submitting the same pages from multiple domains, or submitting the same content from multiple hosts.

Machine-generated Doorway pages. 

Altavista Claims That their software can detect spam and will penalize or might ban page which indulge in spamming.

Altavista Does Not Index

1)Sites that require registration of any kind or password lock.

2)"Scooter" the crawler of altavista cannot get content from a database, because it cannot fill out a form. 

3)Dynamic pages also block Web crawler.

4)Active Server Pages (.asp) with question marks in their URLs (indicating that the page is a script for the construction of a page, rather than just static content) are not indexed. 

5)Text that appears in multimedia files (audio and video) cannot be indexed, but those files can be indexed at AltaVista for MP3/Audio and Video search. 

6)Information that is generated by Java applets or in XML coding cannot be indexed. 

7)Comments, that is, text between <!-- and --> symbols in the source code, aren't indexed at all.

8)Also, consider technical factors. If a site has a slow connection or the pages are very complex, it might time out before the crawler can index all the text. 

9)If you have a hierarchy of directories at your site, put the most important information high, not deep. Search engines will presume that information placed higher is more important. And crawlers may not venture deeper than three, four, or five directory levels. 

LINK POPULARITY

Pages that serve as good hubs, with lots of links to pages that that have related content (topic similarity, rather than random meaningless links such as those generated by link exchange programs intended to generate a false impression of "popularity"). 

The connectivity of pages, including not just how many links there are to a page but where the links come from: the number of distinct domains and the "quality" ranking of those particular sites. This is calculated for the site and also for individual pages. A site or a page is "good" if many pages at many different sites point to it and especially if many "good" sites point to it. 

The level of the directory in which the page is found. Higher is considered more important. If a page is buried too deep, the crawler simply won't go that far and will never find it.
These static factors are recomputed about once a week, and new good pages slowly percolate upward in the rankings. Note that there are advantages to having a simple address and sticking to it so others can build links to it, and so you know that it's in the index 

Following Search Engines or Directories provide content to AltaVista: 

Looksmart 
Real Names 

The following search engines receive content from AltaVista: 
Ask Jeeves 

Changing Or Removing An Entry:

To "Remove" a page, simply resubmit the URL, and the spider will go to it again, find the "404 (not found)" status, and it will disappear from AltaVista within a few days. 

If you wish to "Remove" a page which is valid, you will need to write a robot.txt file for the site.

Exclude your sites from Altavista's crawler 

create a file named robots.txt that states: 

Disallow: /
To exclude just the AltaVista crawler (known as "Scooter") your file should read: 


User-agent: scooter# AltaVista web page search

Disallow: /

To exclude your site's pictures and multimedia files from AltaVista's images, MP3/audio and video clip index: 


User-agent: vscooter# AltaVista Image Search

Disallow: /
To limit the exclusion to a particular directory or file, put the complete path address Disallow: For instance, 


Disallow: /images/personal/

 

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