AltaVista was one of the most popular search engines on the Internet. Created in 1995, it was highly successful before it started losing its dominance in the search engine market to archival Google. Since its creation, it has been changing owners for quite a few times before being taken over by Overture in 2003. 4 months after the acquisition, Overture was taken over by Yahoo causing AltaVista to change owners once again.
In 2004, Yahoo released a statement saying that search results given by AltaVista will be from Yahoo search results itself. This gives web owners and site optimizers a bigger room to breathe as they when they optimize their sites for Yahoo, they will subconsciously optimize their sites for AltaVista as well.
As usual, on-site optimization is really important in order to get good rankings in any search engines and AltaVista is no different as well. Make sure that the Meta tags are in order and that there are no dead links on any pages as well. Optimize the site so that it would be easy for search engine crawlers to browse through the site.
Experts said that it is best for a website to comply with the W3C standards. For Google and some other search engine, this may not mean much but for AltaVista, this may make a significant increase in the ranking.
If there are on-site optimizations, there must be off-site optimizations as well. An example of one is back link creation. Back links are very important to rank well in any search engine. It is best to get links from relevant websites as it gives the highest weight.
Domain age plays some importance as well. Experts recommend getting a used domain rather than buying a new one as the aged domain is probably out of the ‘sandbox’ of most search engines.
Search engine optimization may take a lot of work. However, patience does pay off. Therefore, it is best to build these links over a long period of time.
Tags: AltaVista, good rankings, off-site optimizations, on-site optimization, optimize site, seo AltaVista, web optimization, website optimization, Yahoo search results