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advice on improving ranking on Lycos

Our spider analyzes your Web pages, it determines keywords and a description based on an algorithm that examines components of the title, headings and subheadings, how frequently words appear, and where they appear, based on full body text. The spider will not index META tags. This information is extracted from the website and stored within the Lycos catalog.

tips and advice

• The best way to improve your ranking is to have content.
• Having a relevant title and page description will improve the ranking.
• Decide two or three terms or phrases on which to focus your efforts -- the "hot" keywords that users are most likely to search for. Give those words priority in your html. Important words should appear more frequently, in larger headings and closer to the top of the screen if not actually in the page title. An introductory paragraph with descriptive text that mentions your "hot" keywords will help a spider to create a better abstract of your site.
  
• Graphical pages are hard to index in the Lycos search, no matter how cool they may look! The ALT attribute of an IMG tag will be analyzed and included in your listing, but we cannot analyze the content of images -- the more text, and the more content, the better.
  
• If your site contains frames, make sure you use a <NOFRAMES> tags. We cannot analyze the content within your frames, but any body text in the <NOFRAMES> section will be indexed. This also addresses a portability issue, since some browsers are not capable of viewing frames.
  
• Some webmasters build pages that include repetitive or irrelevant text, also known as spam. Our spider can identify Web pages that contain spam, "hidden" text, or other means of such practice, and it will exclude them.
  
• To get a general idea of how a spider views your page, look at your Web page through a text-only browser such as Lynx.
  
• Lycos cannot manually influence the search results. The rankings are solely based on the text we have examined and the quality of competing sites.

This and further advice from Lycos - http://www.lycos.co.uk/service/addasite.html