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 Lycos displays Sponsored/Featured Listings at the top of its search results which are derived from Goto.com. If you'd like to be positioned here, you will need to setup a Goto.com account and purchase top rankings for as little as 5 cents per click-through.
Direct Hit listings are displayed on Lycos as "Most Popular" or "Top" sites.
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.
Improve your link popularity! Your ranking is influenced by the link "popularity" of your site. This is determined by how many OTHER Web sites link to your own. The more sites that you can get to link to you, the better!
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.
Fast/All The Web results (rather than Inktomi) are now displayed by Lycos when Lycos does not find any Popular Site Matches from Direct Hit or category matches from Open Directory. The Fast/All The Web results will not generally rank pages the same in both Lycos and Fast/All The Web. Therefore, you should optimize separate pages for each engine. If you are short on time, you may want to optimize for Lycos first since its the more popular of the engines. If you don't achieve top rankings on Fast/All The Web as well, then optimize pages for Fast/All The Web separately.
Lycos favors Title tags where the Keyword is NOT the first word in the Title. Make sure you use some other word as the first word of the Title to score better on Lycos.
If your domain name is listed higher alphabetically, Lycos may rank your site higher, if all other factors are equal. Therefore, sites that begin with "A" can have a slight edge over those that begin with "B". This only plays a role on Lycos.
Lycos favors freshly submitted pages. Therefore, schedule your key pages to be submitted at least once per week, but no more than once per day.
Lycos rankings are currently influenced by their Direct Hit technology (www.directhit.com) which tracks the number of visitors to a site AND how long they stayed before returning to the search engine. Therefore, if visitors are clicking your listing often and staying a while on your site, your ranking will go up. The best thing you can do is make sure the first two hundred characters of your page do a good job of describing its contents, and make sure the content of your site is interesting and appealing.
It is important to be listed among the category searches on Lycos. You do this by adding yourself to the Open Source Directory.
Lycos requires 100 words or more for the Title and Body area combined. If these two areas add up to less than 100 words, your page will not be indexed.
Be sure you are using Keywords near the top of your Body Text, and a least once near the bottom of the Body. Also be sure you've included your Keyword near the bottom of the page embedded within some hyperlink text. This can improve your score.
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 Lycos, try to use the plural form of the Keyword in addition to the singular form when possible to capture more potential traffic.
Lycos recognizes synonyms for many words. Try using words that are closely synonymous with your primary Keyword. This may improve your page's relevancy by establishing a page "theme."
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