 | Additional Tips and Tactics for AltaVista
1. AltaVista does, we believe, index keywords you place in the ALT tags
on your images. Remember, ALT tags provide text for people to read describing
a graphic as they wait for it to load. For example, "You are about to
see a picture of the fastest drill press in the world!" And they provide
a description of the picture to people who are surfing the Web with their
graphics turned "off" so that they don't have to wait for large files
to load.
2. Remember to watch your title and description tags to make sure you
use your most important keywords early - but not too early. We've found
that AltaVista likes pages that use the targeted keyword as the second
or third word in the title, but not the first. Make sure the copy near
thetop of the visible page is rich with your important keywords as this
has a bearing on AltaVista's relevancy scoring system. Don't try to target
too many different keywords on a single page, or you'll dilute the effectiveness.
3. Because AltaVista indexes pages so quickly (usually in one or two days),
you can experiment with your keyword placement and resubmit to measure
change in your ranking. For this reason, using different doorway pages
that feature different keywords can be really effective. Pick the keyword
that you want to feature on a particular doorway page, tweak your title,
META tags and first few paragraphs on the page, submit, measure, adjust,
submit, tweak, submit and climb the list!
4. Pages with upward of 900 total words of copy have proven successful
on AltaVista. How many total words are on your Web site's viewable page?
Can you increase the number of total words, or, build a doorway page with
more words on that page?
5. Use at least one keyword in a <H1> headline at the top of the
page.
6. Pay attention to "stop words" and make sure they don't appear frequently
in any place where a keyword might be considered for relevancy - hint:
in the <TITLE>.
7. AltaVista doesn't seem to use "exact matching," meaning that if your
page is optimized very well for one particular word that might be part
of a larger keyword phrase, you can achieve a top ranking on that phrase
as well as many others. For example, if you have a top ranking on the
keyword "y2k," you will have an easier time achieving a top ranking phrases
that include that word such as "y2k assessment" and "y2k development service."
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