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April 15, 1999
New Secrets to AltaVista Top Rankings
AltaVista once favored short, concise pages. Those times are long since behind us. Today, our research has shown that longer pages of around 870 to 970 words generally achieve the best rankings on AltaVista. That may sound like a lot of text, but don't skimp here. Creating the page within these parameters will often make a huge difference in your rankings.
Next, add one repetition of the keyword or phrase you're targeting to the following areas or your Web page (or doorway page):
- The <TITLE> tag
- The meta keyword tag
- The meta description tag
- The Heading tag (e.g., the <H1> to <H6> tags)
- The link text
- The copy appearing in the general body area of the page (the viewable text)
Keep the words as close to the FRONT of the tag, and the beginning of the page as you can. Avoid the temptation to overuse the keyword. We've been submitting pages for competitive keywords recently with no more than 5 to 6 occurrences of the word on the entire page. Pages optimized as we've described above tend to rank well most of the time.
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