* The keyword frequencies suggested below are based on the number of times ANY of the words in your keyword phrase "Insurance Protection Health Risks Traveling Abroad" appear on the page, DIVIDED by the number of words in the phrase.

A word count from 6 to 8 is suggested for the Title area. Your word count is 9 right now so you might consider decreasing your word count in the Title.

A word count from 9 to 25 is suggested for the Meta Keywords area. Your word count is 127 right now so you might consider decreasing your word count in the Meta Keywords.

A keyword frequency from 1 to 8 is suggested for the Link Text area. Your frequency is 0.0 right now so you might consider increasing your Keyword count in the Link Text.

A keyword prominence of at least 41% is suggested for the Link Text area. Your prominence is 0.0% right now so you might consider increasing your prominence in the Link Text.

A keyword frequency from 1 to 11 is suggested for the Hyperlink Url area. Your frequency is 0.0 right now so you might consider increasing your Keyword count in the Hyperlink Url.

A keyword frequency from 1 to 2 is suggested for the Alt area. Your frequency is 0.0 right now so you might consider increasing your Keyword count in the Alt.

A word count from 1 to 59 is suggested for the Alt area. Your word count is 0 right now so you might consider increasing your word count in the Alt.

A keyword prominence of at least 45% is suggested for the Alt area. Your prominence is 0.0% right now so you might consider increasing your prominence in the Alt.

A word count from 333 to 494 is suggested for the Body Text area. Your word count is 267 right now so you might consider increasing your word count in the Body Text.

A keyword prominence of at least 45% is suggested for the Body Text area. Your prominence is 29.7% right now so you might consider increasing your prominence in the Body Text.

Link popularity score: 0 links to domain www.tripinsurancewiz.com were found using AltaVista to perform the check. 18 links to compare domain www.internationalhealthplans.com were found using AltaVista to perform the check. This is called your link popularity. Links from other sites are very important to achieving top rankings. The more links from other Web sites you have, the more it can help improve your rankings. It also makes it easier to get and stay indexed. To check link popularity on competing sites or to improve your link popularity, click here.

In general, home pages will rank higher than sub-pages, all other things being equal. Therefore, if you are looking for an additional advantage, consider purchasing additional domains named after the most important Keywords you wish to optimize, and then optimize the home page for each domain for a different Keyword. A home page is defined as a page name with the root ending in "home.", "index.", or "default." such as "index.htm", "default.asp", or "myhome.html". For example, an ideal Url would be "http://www.mykeyword.com/index.htm." To check the availability of a domain or to purchase a domain name, click here.

Although this engine supports frames, you should make sure you repeat the primary content of your page in the NOFRAMES section so that the engine will be able to index it. Be aware that you'll almost always rank higher if you create optimized pages designed to rank well, that point to your framed pages, but do not include frames themselves. For more tips optimizing pages that use frames, click here.

Your Meta Keywords tag contains 127 words. Research indicates that AltaVista indexes only the first 101 words, so you must be sure your Keywords fall within the first 101 words to be effective on AltaVista.

Consider adding Alt tags to your graphics which contain Keywords.

Some engines do not read META tags or Title tags properly if the Title tag does not appear first in the Head area. Please move your Title tag so it's the first tag after the Head tag.

October 14, 2002 - Advanced tip: Improve rankings via Server Side Includes (SSI) and keep your content fresh.

October 14, 2002 - Search Engine Marketing 101: Learn What Search Engines See When They Visit Your Web Site.

September 12, 2002 -AltaVista appears to be making use, or greater use of "themes." It tends to rank sites that include the Keyword across many pages of the Web site higher than pages that do not repeat the Keyword throughout the site. Therefore, if your most important Keyword was "blue widgets," then you should try to use that phrase on the majority of your Web pages. Even if you are not trying to optimize every page for the phrase "blue widgets," it is helpful with AltaVista to establish Web site themes using you important Keywords.

June 15, 2002 - It's not enough to achieve top positions. If you have a high ranking and few people click on your listing, then what good is it? Learn to increase your clicks by creating 'Killer Title Tags.'

May 15, 2002 - Make sure your pages, particularly your home page loads quickly to prevent people from clicking away. Try to keep the page size plus all the images to no more than 50K to 75K. You can use free services like Spinwave's Image Cruncher to compress your image files.

May 15, 2002 - Alta Vista also determines relevancy by looking at the Alt Tag for your images. Try describing your images by using your Keyword phrase ONE time. Don't repeat your Keyword phrase over and over. Click here for more details.

April 30, 2002 - AltaVista states they may ban sites that use tiny text, similar text color as the background color, pages with little or no content, auto-refresh forwarding pages used to deceive the engine. Other things considered as spam by AltaVista are duplicate pages and pages with misleading Keywords, or excessive use of keywords.

April 30, 2002 - Other methods to improve rankings on AltaVista include Keyword Prominence in the Body Text, Link Popularity, and Theme-Based Content.

April 30, 2002 - To improve your rankings, include Keywords in the Url Title area (max. 125 characters), Meta Description area (max. 192 characters), Meta Keywords area, and Heading area.

April 6, 2002 : Choosing the right Keywords to target is of paramount importance to your success in search engine marketing. Learn about an ingenious way to use Wordtracker to find Keywords that will not only make it easier to gain top rankings, but will gain you more traffic than poorly chosen Keywords.

April 6, 2002 : As reported by Planet Ocean, FAST sees spam as public enemy number one. They've identified two-thirds of the servers in the world as spam servers. Be sure you read our article about how to ensure your Web site does not inadvertently share a blacklisted IP. Having a "tainted" IP address could prevent you from achieving top rankings not only on AlltheWeb/Lycos, but also on AltaVista.

March 17th 2002 - Most of the major engines offer some form of paid submission or inclusion option. Learn about the various forms of paid submission and how you can use these options to your advantage.

February 8th, 2002: IMPORTANT: Avoid spamming a search engine and having your pages dropped in rank or banned! Read "Thou Shalt Not Spam: The 12 Commandments of Search Engine Marketing."

Learn how to bring in additional traffic and gain easy top rankings on commonly misspelled words. There's a free service that will help you do it.

Including Keywords in the H1 Heading tag can improve your rank on many search engines. Learn how to use the H1 tag while controlling its appearance on your page.

AltaVista announced an express submission service. Unfortunately, the prices are approximately twice as high as Inktomi's express service if you purchase 12 months. Fresh submissions (even if the page is optimized) appear to initially get buried down the list just as badly as free submissions do recently. Therefore, at least at this time, we suggest spending your money elsewhere unless getting indexed on AltaVista within a week is essential for you.

Read our exclusive AltaVista interview in the August 2001 MarketPosition newsletter for tips on how AltaVista works and ranks pages.

Include your company name and address on every significant page of your Web site. This will improve your chances of being found when a person searches for a product or service in a certain city or part of the country.

Purchasing and setting up multiple domains can be a great way to increase your visibility on the Web and if you cross-link your domains, you can improve your link popularity for each site. This can also enhance your "theme" rating. However, it's best if you host the cross linked domains at separate Web hosts so that the first 3 blocks of the site's IP address (xxx.xxx.xxx) are different. Some engines may ignore link popularity if the IP addresses of the sites are too close together numerically. Warning: Make sure each new domain has unique content to avoid spamming!

Read our Top 5 Tips and Mistakes of Search Engine Marketers for a great overview of what you should do and not do to promote your site.

AltaVista displays Sponsored/Featured Listings at the top of its search results which are derived from Overture. If you'd like to be positioned here, you will need to setup an Overture account and purchase top rankings for as little as 5 cents per click-through. Before doing this, read our tips!

All major engines claim to prefer Web sites with high-quality content. In addition to improving your rankings, enhancing the quality of your Web site will also help convert more visitors to SALES. Don't fall into the trap of creating dozens of "cookie-cutter" pages that are devoid of valuable content or are lacking in aesthetics. See our article on creating high-quality pages to make your Web site the very best it can be.

AltaVista now requires manual submissions. Learn the pros and cons to this change.

There's four main areas that have the most influence in your AltaVista rankings. Learn these and other secrets direct from an inside source at AltaVista.

IMPORTANT: Be sure you are targeting the right keywords! If you optimize for Keywords that nobody is searching for then all your efforts will be in vain. Click here to learn more.

AltaVista expanded its rules on what it considers spamdexing during the first quarter of 2000. One noteable change is that you should avoid creating multiple duplicate pages or near-duplicate pages if there's a chance that AltaVista would find them. Create pages with good, and varied content that still adheres to the rules in the Page Critic advice. Click here for more information.

It's thought that AltaVista is more likely to reindex your page after changes are made if you change the size of the file by 50 to 75 bytes (characters) since your last submission. You could do this by simply adding or subtracting spaces at the bottom of the page as needed. The logic is that the engine may skip pages that it thinks have not changed much.

It's believed that AltaVista may prefer larger sites with lots of pages. The thinking is that a site with more content will most likely be of greater value to their visitors. Therefore, make sure your site has plenty of content with links to that content from your home page. This content should reside on your web site, though, and not on other sites.

You can improve your score if you allow your optimized pages to be spidered by AltaVista rather than submitting them directly.

Consider creating pages with varying Keyword weights for AltaVista. Click here to learn more.

Obtaining a domain name with your Keyword in it may significantly affect your score on AltaVista. Including the Keyword in a sub-directory name or page name can also help, although not as much. Separate multiple words by dashes, underscores, or slashes in the case of sub-directories. Consider purchasing a secondary domain name for this purpose if ranking well on AltaVista is important to you. To check the availability of a domain or to purchase a domain name, click here.

Along with using your Keyword at the top of the page, you might consider using your Keyword at least once near the bottom of your page in the Body area. This can help convey an overall "theme" to the page and may improve your score. Click here to learn why. Only make this change if it doesn't conflict with the current recommended prominence suggestion.

Since plurals are not recognized as being synonymous by AltaVista, try to use the plural form of the Keyword in addition to the singular form when possible to capture more potential traffic.

AltaVista is believed to be case sensitive. If you are not already doing so, consider using upper, lower, and proper case versions of your most important Keywords to increase traffic.

For additional help in improving your rankings, click here, or see the Page Analysis.

If you have time, try to establish a "theme" to your Web Site to improve your rankings. Whenever possible, link to your optimized pages from other pages and domains with your important Keywords in the linking text. For more information on cross-linking, themes, and the advantages/disadvantages of multiple domains, click here.

If you have any comments, suggestions, or questions about the above advice, e-mail us at help@webposition.com.