Web Site Ranking Tips --> Lycos

Lycos says that they have an index comprised of over 50 million pages. Lycos is still hanging in there as one of the major search engines and they are in a restructuring phase that they hope will help to keep them in the race. They have recently made a bid to keep up in the ever changing and challenging search engine wars, with the recent purchase of HotBot from Wired Digital. They have also recently changed their whole look and the way they deliver search results. Lycos now uses a directory structure along with its data base of spidered pages.

This directory structure is taken from the Open Door Project site which is owned by Netscape. If you want to do well on Lycos you have to list your site with ODP. You can list with them directly from the Lycos site. At the present time our experience shows us that it takes up to 4 MONTHS to get listed in the Lycos spidered data base. Lycos has just refreshed their spidered data base, lets hope they will do so again soon. They have been promising better times for the last year.Want to list with ODP from Lycos? Here's how.

First: Go to Lycos and do a search for the term you want to rank under.
Second: If there are catagories listed then click on the catagory link that best describes your product, service or page content. Note: if there is not a catagory listed then the default first listing is from Lycos search engine data base.
Third: You should now be in an area with web sites listed. Go to the bottom of this page and click on the Add Website link. Fill in the required information, submit and you are finished. This will get you into the Open Door Project, Lycos and Netscape data base of sites.

Here are a few tips on how to get better rankings on Lycos.

Key #1
Lycos has a full page indexing system but does not index Meta tags. You should make sure you use your keywords or phrases in your title tag. Do not put two hundred key words in this tag, use your common sense. Remember that people using a search engine see this title tag and it represents your business or concern - it is an introduction. Use a Meta description tag even though Lycos uses the top 200 words of text on your page as the description they display in your listing. We say this because it does not hurt and who knows when this will change, so be prepared. Also use the Meta keyword tag. Lycos does not recognize this tag but it does not penalize for it either. It is a good habit to always have this tag in your html source, being used properly, without overdoing repetition of keywords or phrases.

Key #2
Concentrate on the text in your pages for Lycos. They like to see lots of occurrences of your key words or phrases on a page. Put in as many of these as possible, without distracting from the smooth readability of the text.

Key #3
Lycos considers invisible or same colored text and very small text as a spamming technique and will penalize your page for using it, so do not try this. They also do not index comment tags, but they will index Alt image tags, so use occurrences of your keywords or phrases in the Alt image tags.

Key #4
Lycos has a limited ability to index frames pages. Make sure if you have a site designed with frames that you use the "NOFRAMES" tag and put the text you want the spider to see in this tag. That is the only way you have a chance of getting any kind of listing with most of the major search engines.

Do not spend a LOT of time worrying about your listings on Lycos, but do not forget about them either. Even with the long indexing time and the small amount of traffic, a high listing on Lycos in a good search term can send some unexpected results.

Click here to go directly to the Lycos submission page.
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