AltaVista uses your page's meta tags, description, keywords, and link descriptions to work out a ranking score. It's Belgium site http://altavista.advalvas.be also shows the score given to each indexed page but the top position does not necessarily go to the best scoring page. It is useful to have several pages where you vary the keyword density.
AV differentiates between upper and lower case letters. Most people search using lower case so go with the flow. Some use all UPPER CASE and very few use First Letter Capitalization.
Put your keyword in the meta title tag and use headers at the top of the page with just your keyword. Then have keywords appear at the start of the first paragraph of the page. AV likes keywords to appear in links such as :
<A HREF="keyword.html">keyword</a>
Don't repeat the keywords too often as AV doesn't like this and may penalise your page.
Alt tags don't seem to make much difference but spamming will get you a penalty or banned. There is a daily submissions limit on AV and it is best to submit each page only once per day. Once in, AV seems to give a higher relevancy score to pages it has found itself so include links on your submitted page to other pages on your site for Scooter to follow.
Submit to AltaVista at http://www.altavista.com/cgi-bin/query?pg=addurl
(c) 1999 Acorn Internet
