Mastering AltaVista: A Comprehensive Guide to Ranking High

Understanding AltaVista's Ranking System

AltaVista's ranking system is unique and understanding it can significantly improve your website's visibility. Here are some key points to consider:

• Keyword Count: AltaVista counts keywords twice. Therefore, it's crucial to place your most important keywords in the title and H1 tags. To find the best keyword strings, use the "search term suggestion" tool at GOTO.com.

• Title Tag: Keywords in the title tag score the highest points, especially if they are at the beginning of the title.

• First Lines of Text: Keywords in the first lines of text are also very important. The H1 tag may score you more points than text.

• Metatag "keywords": This is not as important to ranking as the first lines of text. Keywords found here could lower your score if they are also in the first lines of text.

• Link Popularity: Links from other relevant sites are very important. The more distinct domains, the better. Also, "good" sites score more highly. To check who links to a site, use the +link:sitename.com -host:sitename.com command.

• Rare Words: Rare words score more than common words. This is a technique known as "inverse document frequency".

• Phrase Preservation: AltaVista stores all the words on the page to preserve phrases. Therefore, if you search for a specific phrase, sites with that exact phrase will be listed first.

• Page Level: Pages at a high level rank higher than pages buried deep into the site. Therefore, it's worth registering more domains and using them as "doorway sites". Link these sites back to your main site to get extra "link popularity".

Case Study: Search for "mp3"

To illustrate these points, let's analyze the results of a search for "mp3" conducted on March 21, 2000. The top 10 results were as follows:

| Rank | URL | Title | |------|-----|-------| | 1 | mp3.com/aboutus.html | MP3.com - About MP3.com | | 2 | mp3.musichall.cz | PeZ MP3 PagE | | 3 | mp3.lycos.com | Lycos Music: MP3 Search | | 4 | webcelerator.org/f/mp3.html | MP3 Audio Finder - brought to you by eAcceleration Corp. | | 5 | mp3.box.sk | MP3.BOX.SK | | 6 | ecom99.mp3.com/cgi-bin/shop.cgi | Shopping Cart | | 7 | mp3.boston.com | MP3 music on Boston.com | | 8 | mp3.com | MP3.com: free mp3 downloads online cd jukebox MP3 music greeting cards | | 9 | mp3yes.com | MP3Yes.com, #1 Source for MP3's on the Internet | | 10 | mp3place.com | The MP3 Place - Music and Information for the Digital Generation |

Key Takeaways

From this analysis, we can conclude that having the keyword in the URL or page name is beneficial. Home pages score much higher. The presence of "shopping cart" in the list suggests that having a large number of links from other pages on the same site can boost the ranking.

Template for Top Results

Based on these observations, here's a template for achieving top results:

• URL: Include the keyword phrase, use the dash for best results.
• Page Name: Include the keyword phrase if it's not in the URL.
• Page Title: Include the phrase at the start of the title.
• Meta Description and Keywords: Include the phrase as a string.
• H1 Tag: Include the phrase.
• Text: Include the phrase at the top of the page.
• Links: Include links to sites with the keyword in them.

If any "good" sites link to you, ensure that AltaVista has registered the pages with the links. If not, you can register the linking pages to improve your link popularity using the AltaVista add URL page.