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Search Engine Optimization
Roger Gonzales
Altavista policy on doorway pages and cloaking
AltaVista is opposed to doorway pages and cloaking. It considers doorway and cloaked pages to be spam and encourages people to use other avenues to increase the relevancy of their pages. A description of doorway pages and cloaking is given later on in this guide.
Meta tags
Though it indexes Meta tags, considering them to be regular text, AltaVista claims it doesn't give them priority over HTML titles and other text. Though you should use meta tags in all your pages, some webmasters claim their doorway pages for AltaVista rank better when they don't use them.
If you do use Meta tags, make your description tag no more than 150 characters and your keywords tag no more than 1,024 characters long.
Keywords in the URL and file names
It's generally believed that AltaVista gives some weight to keywords in filenames and URL names. If you're creating a file, try to name it with keywords.
Keywords in the ALT tags
AltaVista indexes ALT tags, so if you use images on your site, make sure to add them. ALT tags should contain more than the image's description. They should include keywords, especially if the image is at the top of the page. ALT tags are explained later.
Page Length
There's been some debate about how long doorway pages for AltaVista should be. Some webmasters say short pages rank higher, while others argue that long pages are the way to go. According to AltaVista's help section, it prefers long and informative pages. We've found that pages with 600-900 words are most likely to rank well.
Frame support
AltaVista has the ability to index frames, but it sometimes indexes and links to pages intended only as navigation. To keep this from happening to you, submit a frame-free site map containing the pages that you want indexed. You may also want to include a "robots.txt" file to prohibit AltaVista from indexing certain pages.
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Copyright © Roger Gonzales
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