Using a transparent spacer .GIF to promote your web site

Anything that can give your web site a boost on the search engines is worth considering. Using a transparent single pixel image is one such device...

Search engines are a plague for Webmasters! Not only does each of the major search engines have its own quirks, but they keep on changing their 'rules'.

For example, one 'trick' used to be to have keyword studded text at the top of the page in a very small font size, and of a color identical or close to the background color. This made it invisible to readers of the page, but the words registered on some search engines. Then Infoseek latched onto this and refused to index any site which used this device.

However, there is one way in which you can get invisible text accepted by some search engines. Here's how you do it:

• Create a transparent.GIF image just one pixel in size
• Put this at the very top of your page
• Inside the ALT tag for this image, put a key-word studded description of the page / site, up to 275 characters in length.

This will certainly be picked up by Lycos, which does not use META tags for key words, but takes the 1st 200 characters after the BODY tag for the description. This includes those words inside an image's ALT tag. It may also be used by Altavista and Infoseek

This highlights the need to fine-tune your page so that it can take advantage of the quirks of the major search engines - Altavista, Yahoo, Excite, Hotbot, Infoseek and Lycos - which account for about 95% of the usage of search engines.

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