COMPUTER-SAVVY CULT HID MESSAGES ON SITE.

Byline: P.J. Huffstutter Daily News Staff Writer

Like the entertaining subliminal messages found on vinyl records such as the Beatles' ``Abbey Road,'' members of the Heaven's Gate hid dozens of phrases on their Web site.

Unlike the Beatles, however, Heaven's Gate had a practical reason for encoding words on their page: Alphabetically listed from Antichrist to Yoda, the words are meant to be detected by the World Wide Web's search tools so that more Internet surfers would be directed to the site.

The phrases include: messiah, members of the next level, rapture, space alien and end of the world.

The black text, camouflaged on the black screen, is visible only if someone happens to highlight them, probably by mistake.

``It's not something they did because they were really weird. It's a pretty accepted trick among savvier Web designers,'' said Melissa Regan, co-founder of the Bay Area-based firm Internet Media Services.

Members of Heaven's Gate were accomplished Web-site designers, even making enough money off it to rent the spacious Rancho Santa Fe mansion where their bodies were found.

After the high-tech cult committed suicide this week, Internet users flooded servers trying to view the group's religious site - http://www.heavensgate.com - in hopes of learning more about this group whose members believed that their deaths would result in a meeting with a UFO trailing the Hale-Bopp comet.

Experts with Internet search companies like Yahoo!, Excite and HotBot say that most users did not spot the dozens of words hidden on the bottom of the site's home page.

Some of these words were coded as ``meta tags,'' or bits of information - such as descriptions or key words - that search engines scan to find out more data about a particular site.

People who were curious about extraterrestrial life could type in the words ``UFO'' and ``space alien'' into a search engine, which would then browse millions of Web pages for these key phrases. NASA's Web site might pop up, or maybe the Heaven's Gate site.

Ideally, the more times the browser finds these phrases on a particular page, the greater its relevancy for that particular search.

But it's not always true. Sites hawking sexually-oriented material often ``stuff'' their pages with lurid words, said Bill Younker, chief executive of the Bedford, Mass.-based Net marketing services Submit It! Inc. Other popular phrases include ``computers,'' ``Pamela Anderson'' and ``naked supermodels.''

``It's only really something you see with the more savvy Web masters,'' said Graham Spencer, chief technology officer for the Mountain View-based Internet navigation service Excite Inc. ``Because there's so much information out there, people get very creative in finding ways to trick search engines. People want their site to be the first one listed in the results.''

Spencer recalled one Web designer whose page included nonsensical sentences where each noun and verb was sexually explicit.

``The theory was that the search engine would discount random words, but consider valid anything that appeared to be a sentence,'' Spencer said.

Yet the metatags may have worked against the cult as most search engine firms take steps to weed out such ploys.

``It's just a matter of tweaking the software to ignore multiple words,'' said David Pritchard, marketing director for the San Francisco-based search engine company HotBot. ``If random words come up too often, then the search engine will just ignore them all.''