Getting a good ranking in Altavista

[Johan]

Like Google Altavista gave me many hits. But their ranking algorithm rates my pages (from www.futuremovies.co.uk) poorly now!

Click here to view spidered pages (http://uk.altavista.com/q?pg=q&q=url%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.futuremovies.co.uk&kl=&what=uk&search.x=25&search.y=10)

Anyone know of any tricks or HTML optimisation to get higher on Altavista?

All I know is use: <title><H><P> tags
and to ignore META tags

[OZGRESSION]

I used to have a free mp3 site that regularly ranked in the top 20 at alta vista (plus about the top 100 at google) and I think it was because of the large amount of link exchanges I did with site with similar content, which were also in the top 20 search results, that got me there. So I strongly recommend link exchanges for a good ranking. Apart from that tweaking meta-tags etc always helps...

[Jason]

<yoda>Ahh... it is AltaVista you seek, this secret do I know</yoda>

In the past, I have successfully won the top position for the search phrases "free clip art", "clip art", "free images", for the site free-clip-images (I have since changed the meta tags for other reasons). I also currently have a top 3 position for "webmaster resources" on 123webmaster.com (I'm sure I could push for #1, but I haven't played with the meta tags for some time). AltaVista, in all of it's glory is still fairly predictable. Sure a good link popularity helps, but it is not completely necessary for success. The trick to AltaVista is keyword repetition.

Now there are some webmasters that will say that you should never repeat keywords because the search engines consider it spamming, and this is true, but for it to happen, you must really go nuts with the repetition. The way to succeed with AltaVista is to pick two or three words that you really want, and work them into a sentence in your tags such as:

<TITLE>Reviewed movie reviews from reviewers that have reviewed horror movies, sci-fi movies, action movies, drama movies, comedy movies, and new release movies. We review new movies weekly</TITLE>

<META name="Description" content="Your movies review source">

If you take tags like those, and mix it in with a good set of keywords so you'll get hits from other searches (don't forget to also include movie, movies, review, reviews as keywords), then you'll get a decent ranking with AltaVista, possibly one of the best for the terms "movies" and "reviews" in both the singular and the plural. You can always tweak it as you go along.

It may not look pretty, but you if you really want to know how to get to the top of AltaVista, this is it.

[Johan]

Thanks for the tip and I will get back to you on the results after a month or so.