ALTAVISTA

Must submit EACH page? OPTIONAL
How long to index my page? 1-3 days, usually 1 day
Recognizes and supports META tags? YES
Are searches case sensitive? YES**
Does a spider index the site? YES
Uses data entered on submission form only? NO
Is page popularity a factor? YES
Alphabetical ranking used? NO
Keyword weight plays a role? YES
Title tag considered for relevancy? YES (place keyword in second or third position, not the first position, for best results)

Prominence of keywords in title tag important? YES
Frequency of keywords in title tag important? YES
Comment tags considered for relevancy? NO
Max. length of title accepted 1,024 characters
Max. length of keyword META tag UNKNOWN
Max. length of description field you can submit N/ A
How to check your link popularity link: http:// www. yourcompany. com
How to check to see if you're listed Type:
+url: company. com (the "+ url" must be lowercase)

E-mail support avsub@ altavista. digital. com or search-support@
altavista. com.
support@ altavista. com.

Total documents indexed 100 million

Total page views 20 million searches a day (press release
quoted several million page views - it was unclear if that was "per day,"

however it is more likely this number was for the month of October 1997 )

Add/ Remove URL http:// www. altavista. com/ av/ content/ add url. htm

** A search for "financial analyst" will return a different set of matches than if they conduct a search for "Financial Analyst." Therefore it's important to include keywords with both uppercase and lowercase first letters where appropriate. Are your prospects more likely to search on "Total Quality" or "total quality?" If you're not sure, include both in your keyword META tag. Recent surveys show that 80-90 percent of people are searching for keywords in lowercase.

Flash Update! AltaVista is now auctioning #1 and #2 rankings for keyword queries in their search engine. For more information, contact DoubleClick at http:// www. doubleclick. com. We managed to interview one of AltaVista's software engineers who shared some information about the index with us. He asked that we not use his name, but he did offer some insight into AltaVista's ranking algorithm. For instance, he shared that unique words will "get you a higher ranking," and the keyword and description META tags should include some of these unique, specific keywords for better relevancy scores.

He also suggested that you target these unique keywords so that your site doesn't fall into a huge general category. All good advice, and some of it we covered in our earlier discussion on "power-combos." Here's the rest of the story from our own experience and observations: AltaVista has in incredibly large database of Web sites, such that searches often return hundreds of thousands of Web site matches. AltaVista's spider goes down about three pages into your site.

This is important to remember if you have different topical pages that won't be found within three clicks of the main page. You will have to index them separately. You cannot tell AltaVista how to index your site, it is all done via their spider, but you can go to their site and give the spider a nudge by submitting specific pages. That way, AltaVista's spider knows to visit that page and index it. Once you have done that, it's all up to your META tags and your page's content!

AltaVista's spider may revisit your site each month after its initial visit. AltaVista ranking algorithms reward keywords in the <TITLE> tag. If a keyword is not in a title tag, it will likely not appear anywhere near the top of the search results! AltaVista also rewards keywords near one another, and keywords near the beginning of a page (read: top of the page). Your best chance of achieving a high ranking in AltaVista is if someone performs a keyword query using multiple keywords, several of which appear in your title and keyword tag.

To stress this again, keywords in the <TITLE> tag are very important for AltaVista. Here are some suggested steps:

Step 1: Create longer doorway pages for optimizing as AltaVista still seems to favor pages with up to 900 words on the page. AltaVista doesn't appear to value keywords in the URLs, but we suggest including keywords in the URLs of these doorway pages, nonetheless. It will only be a matter of time before all search engines will consider keywords in URLs, in our opinion, and there's no harm.

AltaVista recently posted a news release on its site about going after Web sites for spam, claiming that it receives 20,000 submissions a day, half are spam, or at least attempts to improve rankings. AltaVista has implemented serious anti-spam technology and reviews pages, so be careful about making too many doorway pages and how many keywords you pursue.

Step 2: Make sure you include a META description tag and put your important keywords early in that tag.

Step 3: Put keywords in a link to your main site. For example:

<A HREF=" http:// www. primarydomain. com"> follow me to information about keyword1, keyword2, keyword3 - our new site!</ A> or some such link that directs to the page that you want visitors to find.

Step 4: Consider submitting only one page per day or at least a small number per day. Part of AltaVista's new anti-spam initiative appears to be rejecting multiple URL submissions in a short period of time. You might get away with several submissions a day, but why set off the spam alarm in a way that will put your site on a "spam review" list? If you submit a single page that links to all your doorway pages, then AltaVista should spider to each of those links and index them for you, although it may not index them as quickly as the page you submitted.

An AltaVista Secret You Need to Know
In all the searches we've conducted to date, few of the high ranking pages found in AltaVista utilize META tags. Conversely, META tags are used more often on high ranking pages on many OTHER engines. This indicates that META tags either do not help your score on AltaVista, or might even put you at a disadvantage. We recommend removing your keyword META tag for pages submitted to AltaVista. You should still keep your META description tag to tell AltaVista what summary description you'd like them to use in describing your page.

The top ranking pages most commonly have short <TITLE> tags that include just 3 to 5 words, and only include one occurrence of the keyword. Having the keyword at the beginning of the title tag is the most helpful. Pages that have done well in AltaVista had a lot of words on the page (more than 200) or are at the opposite extreme and have no words in the body and follow a format like this:

<HEAD> <TITLE>
Schematic Diagram of RCRRC Mechanism </ TITLE>
</ HEAD>
<BODY BGCOLOR="# ffffff">
<H1>< CENTER> Schematic Diagram of RCRRC Mechanism</ CENTER></ H1>
<CENTER> <IMG SRC=" figure/ RCRRC. gif">
</ CENTER>

The above page ranked #1 for the keyword "schematic diagram". You'll notice:

1. The keyword is used once at the start of the title.
2. The keyword is used again at the start of a heading tag.
3. No words are used in the body area.

Based on this evidence, it seems that AltaVista assigns the greatest importance to keywords found in titles and headings. Since some top ranking pages include no words at all in other less important areas of the Web pages like the body copy, pages like the one described above generally rank very well if the title and heading (< H1> through <H6> tags) include important keywords and few other words.

If you use this technique, you may want to add a link around an image like this:
<a href=" index. htm">< IMG SRC=" mygraphic. gif"></ a>

The graphic described above will link visitors to another page on your site when they click on it. You should create a graphic that includes text explaining your services and asking them to "click here" to learn more. You may then link to any page that applies.