Search Engine TipsThe biggest problem that most people have with the search engines, is a failure to understand what the Search Engines are going to do with each page they have designed. Because of this failure to understand the search engines, there are many fantastically beautiful websites out there which will never receive the exposure they deserve, and if no one can find your site you will soon go bankrupt. How a search engine indexes and summarizes your web page is some what a black art but with some research and my guide it will be entirely in your control. Please click here of a list major search engines altavista.com The AltaVista spider is a deep search spider, meaning it will index all of the pages within a website assuming you provide a path to the page. Submitting your top url to AltaVista will cause their spider to visit all the pages within your website. Generally the exception to this rule are pages which are dynamically created (using some sort of cgi).AltaVista will index as much of your html as it possibly can, including alt text comments in image statements, titles, urls, directory names, visible text, image maps and meta tags. Alta Vista ignores html comments. AltaVista utilizes the meta keywords tag and the meta description tag. The keywords help increase the relevancy of a page to a particular search term or terms, while the description tag is used instead of using the visible page text from the page. The example below was located by searching for "Double Glazing" in AltaVista. 1. Double-Glazing-Replacement-Windows There are several important things that need to be noted here. The title of the listing was obtained directly from the html <title> tag. If you omit a title, AltaVista substitutes a "NO TITLE" in place of where your title would have gone. The description for this entry came directly from the meta description tag. AltaVista dates the entry so it makes it easier to track updates making their way into the index. Should you omit your Meta Description tag, Alta Vista will use up to 150 characters of visible text as your summary for a listing. Here is what AltaVista says in regard to ranking;"Content counts; content near the top of a page counts more than content at the end. In particular, the HTML title and the first few lines of text are the most important part of your pages. If the words and phrases that match a query happen to appear in the HTML title or first lines of text of one of your pages, chances are very good that that page will appear high in the list of search results. "
A lot of people ask what is "content"? Content is what you are reading, its why the main page contains mostly text. AltaVista considers meta tags to be of secondary importance when
ranking a page. In fact one part of their faq actually goes on to state; "Basically, METAtags are a band aid to help you deal with pages that don't state what they are about in clear text, right up front. Do it right to begin with, and you don't need METAtags at all. You'll get far better results in terms of search engine traffic that way." AltaVista also uses site popularity to help boost the ranking of a
website. Unfortunately this method has a tendency to penalize newer
websites. In essence site popularity means how many sites are linking
back to you. The more sites that link to you, the higher the ranking
your site will receive. One of Alta Vista's most useful features for a
webmaster is the ability to find out how many sites are linking to you.
Just add your url into the box below and you will find out how many
sites are linking to you. Note that because of the distributed nature of
the AltaVista database, this number can vary depending upon server
loads, so its best to take this number several times, keeping only the
highest number.
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