Getting indexed on AltaVista

[Diane Madrigal]

On Wed, 25 Jun 1997, Van Kalmthout, Frank wrote:

> We are trying to get our website (http://www.gov.on.ca/MCZCR/archives)
> indexed on AltaVista.  We submitted out URL about a month ago, were told
> that "the robot has recorded the URL" and that "it would be indexed in a
> day or two,"  and still nothing has happened.  If you search "Archives
> of Ontario" a number of hits are returned, but none of them is our
> specific URL.

If you search Alta Vista on the URL, six pages from the site are found,
including the home page, so Alta Vista has indexed it. I took a look at
your home page, and I would guess that the reason it doesn't show up when
you search on "Archives of Ontario" is because nowhere on the home page
is there text that says "Archives of Ontario." (Alta Vista is a full-text
indexer.) Text in images doesn't count, because it can't be 'read' by the
spiders/robots that do the indexing. Although some keywords are included
as meta information on your home page, the phrase "Archives of Ontario"
isn't among them, either, so that doesn't help.

There's a lot of information out on the web about how search engines work
and what you can do to increase the chances of your site being indexed
appropriately. I've found Northern Webs' "Search Engine Tutorial"
(http://www.northernwebs.com/set/) very useful; we made some major changes
to our site, particularly our home page, after reading that. Search Engine
Watch(http://searchenginewatch.com/), which I think was mentioned in
another post, also has a lot of information about the search engines and
using meta tags.

Hope this helps.

Diane Madrigal
New York State Library
State Education Department
Albany, NY