Suppose you want users searching for "Hawaiian Bed and Breakfasts" to find your site among the first 20 sites retrieved. Simply adding, removing, or changing a few sentences on your homepage can alter the way our spider indexes you.

 

A D V E R T I S E M E N T

Our design tip is simple: Relegate unrelated topics to subsidiary pages. If you're advertising your Hawaiian Bed and Breakfast, don't use the homepage to emphasize price, the way the ocean looks from a bedroom window, or your famous pineapple rum concoction. Instead, keep it simple: Emphasize bed, breakfast, Hawaii, and vacation.

Make sure that the main page of the site describes to the fullest extent possible what the site's about. It doesn't have to be over-long and exhaustive, but as much text with the important words in it as you can possibly have without sacrificing the design/layout of the site will help on the indexing front.

Use a title uniquely descriptive of your page or site. Since indexing/relevance algorithms give slightly more weight to titles than to body text pages with titles containing dead-weight words like "Homepage" or "Home Page on the WWW" don't often get easily found.

Include a META tag description, and create META tag keywords that contain keywords and phrases related to the content of your web site. Use an assortment of synonyms that accurately describe your site, but don't try to boost the site's relevance by repeating keywords. The overuse and repetition of keywords may result in a lower relevancy score and possible omission from the index.

Example: Here is what Lycos says

There is no steadfast "formula" to insure a certain ranking within a desired search. In addition, we do not "sell" placements within searches. Here's how the system works -- and how you can best describe your page.

When our spider analyzes your Web pages, it determines keywords and a description based on an algorithm that examines components of the title, headings and subheadings, how frequently words appear, and where they appear, based on full body text. The Lycos spider will not index META tags. All of this information is extracted from the page and stored in an abstracted format within the Lycos catalog.

Notes and Tips

• Decide two or three terms or phrases on which to focus your efforts -- the "hot" keywords that our 7 million users are most likely to search for. Give those words priority in your HTML. Important words should appear more frequently, in larger headings and closer to the top of the screen if not actually in the page title. An introductory paragraph with descriptive text that mentions your "hot" keywords will help our software create a better abstract of your site.

• Graphical pages are hard to index in the Lycos search, no matter how cool they may look! The ALT attribute of an IMG tag will be analyzed and included in your listing, but we cannot analyze the content of images -- the more text, and the more content, the better.

• If your site contains frames, make sure you use a <NOFRAMES> section. We cannot analyze the content within your frames, but any body text in the <NOFRAMES> section will be indexed. This also addresses a portability issue, since some browsers are not capable of viewing frames.

• Some webmasters build pages that include repetitive or irrelevant text, otherwise known as spam. Lycos considers this practice to be unacceptable. Our software can identify Web pages that contain spam or "hidden" text and will exclude them from the Lycos catalog.

• To get a general idea of how the Lycos spider views your page, look at your Web page through a text-only browser such as Lynx.

• Lycos cannot manually influence the search results. The rankings are solely based on the text we have examined and the quality of competing sites. No matter how nicely you ask us, we cannot place a Web page higher in the search results.