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Search Engine Tip:
Getting Top Score in Infoseek
by Tom Dahm,
Chief Operations Officer,
NetMechanic, Inc.
Want to get top score in Infoseek? Here's a tip: use adjacent keywords. This simple change to your page can make a dramatic difference in your Infoseek ranking.
Each search engine uses different rules to determine how well your Web page matches a particular query. As a result, building a page that gets a good score in all the major engines is just about impossible. Learning how each engine ranks pages is also hard, since the engines often keep this information as closely guarded secret. However, with a little patience and some experimentation you can reverse engineer how many of the engines work. Because Infoseek indexes pages quickly, it's one of the easier engines to understand.
Infoseek assigns a high score to pages that contain all the words in a search query. So a search for "red convertible" would give your page a high score if it contains both of those words. But Infoseek will give the page a much higher score if the words "red convertible" appear adjacent somewhere on the page. Keep that in mind when you build the META tags for your page. For example, consider the following META tag:
<META NAME="Keywords"
CONTENT="red white blue convertible">
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This page would get a fair score in any query for "red convertible," but would get a much better score in a search for "blue convertible." You could improve this page's visibility by rewriting its keywords as follows:
<META NAME="Keywords"
CONTENT="red convertible,
white convertible,
blue convertible">
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This way your page will get high score for all the car/color combinations. Be careful about repeating keywords too often, though, since Infoseek will throw away your keyword list if you repeat a single word too often. How often can you repeat a keyword? We've heard different reports ranging anywhere from seven to twelve repetitions.
This adjacency rule applies to your TITLE tag, your META tag keywords, and your META tag description. Using adjacent keywords in all three of these tags should get you a good ranking in Infoseek.
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