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.