The META tag: Controlling how your Web page is indexed by AltaVista

In the absence of any other information, AltaVista will index all words in your document (except for comments), and will use the first few words of the document as a short abstract.

It is however possible for you to control how your page is indexed by using the META tag to specify both additional keywords to index, and a short description. Let's suppose your page contains:

<META  name="description" 
content="We specialize in grooming pink poodles.">
<META  name="keywords" content="pet grooming, 
Palo Alto, dog">

AltaVista will then do two things:
• It will index both fields as words, so a search on either poodles or dog will match.
• It will return the description with the URL. In other words, instead of showing the first couple of lines of the page, a match will look like the following:

Pink Poodles Inc


We specialize in grooming pink poodles.
http://pink.poodle.org/ - size 3k - 29 Feb 96

AltaVista will index the description and keywords up to a limit of 1,024 characters.

So the trick is to use the "keywords" in META TAGS to seed the Search Engine with the info you want your page to be located by. It is your chance to stack the deck and be found. All the major Search Engines use the META TAGS to index your site.