Listing of your site on the results page in your chosen category is in two possible sections (for most categories). One section is called Most Popular Sites and this is on top, while the remaining listing is Alphabetical in the second section on the page.

Yahoo does not reveal how it includes certain sites in the Most Popular Sites list. However link analysis and clickthroughs are likely to be factors. You cannot pay to be included in this section. Certain sites with sunglasses shown next to their name or the "@" symbol shown at the end of the name reflect that Yahoo considers those sites as excellent.

Inktomi (MSN Search, AOL Search, Hotbot)

Inktomi is a search engine that does not offer its search services through its own site, but through Partner sites - prominent ones being MSN Search, AOL Search, HotBot and others.

Inktomi through its crawler creates three different indexes. Best of the web index has around 110 million pages that it indexes on the web and considers high in link analysis. The next set of around 390 million pages is indexed as Rest of the web, considered as lower in link analysis. The third index is of paid inclusion. It also offers specialized regional indexes as well as targeted news, multimedia and directory indexes. It avoids duplication of the same page in more than one index. Link crawling and paid inclusion are the two most effective ways to get covered by crawling. For bulk submissions to its paid program, it offers IndexConnect (for 1000 or more pages). Again there is a cost per click basis, with a monthly minimum.

Ranking at Inktomi is determined by a combination of factors including HTML links, keywords and description tags near the top of the page or in the Title tag. If the search string matches with what is found at these places on the page, the ranking is higher. Link analysis and analysis of clickthroughs are other important criteria that it adopts.

AltaVista

AltaVista will accept free listings through its "add url" link, but it also has paid inclusion features. Generally their crawler may visit every four weeks. Paid inclusion may be desirable if you have a new website or pages or if your pages are refreshed every week or so and you do not wish to wait till the next cycle of crawling. There is an Express Paid inclusion service of self-service type for up to 500 pages at a time. This service will enable weekly crawling. Their bulk program called Trusted Feed will enable the pages to be directly linked to their index. Pricing for Trusted Feed is on a cost per click model with a monthly minimum. In this program you can submit the Meta data, descriptions and keywords directly to the index. Nevertheless, the engine will check whether the destination page has the same Meta data or not and could levy a penalty for spam.

AltaVista’s ranking policies are a combination of various factors. The frequency and positioning of keywords and descriptions is important, so are Title tags or words that appear near the top of the page. Besides, it applies link analysis to determine relevancy and page ranking. It levies penalty on spamming and also it does not recognize invisible or tiny text, keyword stuffing, identical pages, mirror sites, and quick meta refresh tag.

3.4 Keywords-Optimizing Your Site to Get Top Rankings on Search Engines

When a user enters a search term, also known as a ‘keyword,’ into a search engine, the engine runs through the billions of pages in the database and awards each one a ‘relevancy score.’ The higher your score, the higher your listing. If your site doesn’t contain the keyword used by the searcher, the only score it’s going to get is a big, fat zero. Your first task then is to make sure you know which keywords are most relevant for each of your sites.

There are three ways to figure out your keywords:

Ask your competitors

This is the cheapest way to find many of the most important keywords. Simply log on to a search engine (AltaVista is good, Google is better) and carry out a search for sites like yours. Open the top site, and once the home page has downloaded, click on ‘View’ in your browser, and then ‘Source.’ That will reveal all the HTML used to build the web page, including all the keywords that have been specially inserted.

For example, let’s say one of your websites sold nutritional supplements. You could carry out a search for ‘vitamins’ in Google. The top site there is called DrugEmporium.com, and the keywords they list are "The Katz group, Snyders, Drug Emporium, Drug, Drug Store, pharmacy, stores."

Some of those keywords will be relevant to your site. Others, of course, won’t be relevant and there will be lots of other keywords that aren’t obviously listed-like ‘vitamins’ for example. But you can repeat the process on other sites, using different keywords, and build up a pretty long list.

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