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@ Home Buys Excite for 6.7 billion dollars. AOL and Netscape which have been sending traffic to Excite will end their favoritism - Netscape on June 17th and AOL/Netfind soon after. Many expect a very dry period for Excite traffic for 6 months as @ Home works to channel its WebTV traffic to Excite to make up for the loss of Netscape and Netfind traffic. Infoseek gets 30% of its traffic from WebTV so Excite has a future, but the near future is likely to be slim.
Add only the top page of your site and let the Excite spider - Architext - find your site and spider your sub-pages. You have a choice of two names for your root or index page that browsers and search engines find when someone types in just your URL without a file name, www.art-teez.org/ for us., The two file names browsers default to are index.htm or default.htm. Unix, the operating system for many computers used as servers (which store your website files and are connected to the Internet on fast lines 24 hours a day) uses four letters in their file name extensions. Equivalent Unix file names are index.html and default.html. These two files are also known as a home page because they are the starting point to enter your site. Be sure to include links to all your important sub-pages on your index.htm page so Search Engine spiders can find and follow them to your other pages.
Notes from the Search Engine Forum at Virtual Promote
(Generally great advice which you should take with a grain of salt)
Example: While the keywords in your Domain Name do not play a part in Excites algorithm say some - others say it does.... Other search engines do take into account the keywords in your domain name. If it does not matter on Excite, it will help you out somewhere so make best use of your selection and build your knowledge of keywords that work for your site's content.
Use a description meta tag because Excite takes its description of your site in its listings from this tag in the head section of your page. If you do not have a description meta tag - you must put a description of your site or page at the top of the page of body text or risk a very weird ugly sampling of HTML code that makes no sense. The potential visitor to your site will keep looking down the search engine list provided to click on another link.
Example: <meta name="description" content="This is a description of my page and site for those visiting Excite and other SE's to read. I can replace this text in-between these parentheses with my own and add it to the head section of my index page."> This tag belongs between your head on code, <head>, and your head off code, </head>, at the beginning of your HTML page.
Start your index page with descriptive text rich in keywords. End your page with the same. If Excite doesn't find descriptive text at the top of the page, it drops to the bottom of the page and works upward. It places weight on keywords in the 3rd quarter of the page. This and the exact weight of words in the title (which most search engines give added weight to) may change but the core algorithm Excite uses remains the same.
Have you ever noticed your site disappear from Excite after successfully registering and witnessing its appearance in their listing? A DNS problem, a server down for maintenance, a bottle neck in the bay area and quite a few other reasons untraceable can prevent Architext, excites spider, from finding your site when it does its bi-weekly crawl and - whoosh - flush goes your page from their index.
Excite has a two part indexing process. The "Refresh Spider" for Excite visits only the root pages that were in its database plus any newly submitted root (index) pages. This is where your previously listed page can be lost. Then Excite's "Roaming Spider" selects at random a group of root pages from its new database. Excites spider, Architext, follows the links on these lucky pages to index up to 25 additional pages on any one root (index.htm) page. This occurs every 2-3 weeks. The chances are about 50% your site will make the random selection for subpage listing. This favors pages popularly linked to many other sites. Even if your sub-page is not selected directly to be spidered - if it is popular and linked to may sites the chances are great it will be reached through a link on a site that is spidered.
Webcrawler (owned by Excite) and Netfind re-index about the same time as Excite. This is about to change for Netfind. They usually re-index the second Monday after a crawl. Review your website visitation stats to find when Architext visited your site and add two weeks. Then that Monday the new rankings should be up. This is important to those who want to test their latest page revisions to see how they rank.
Suggestions
a) Emphasis keywords and content in your title and the non-tables text in the body of your index page. Include sufficient text for the Architext to index (all graphics and little text is not a good balance).
b) Check code on competitors pages ranking high under your keywords to see what they are doing that gets them a high rank.
c) Do not rely on a keyword meta tag to help your rank on Excite. It ignores them.
d) If you use frames or have lots of text in tables us a <no frames> section to describe your page for Excite.
Excite has a strong system to detect identical pages at different URL's. When your make changes to a page or your site content, re-add your index page with the Add URL form on Excite to invite Architext to re-spider your site on the next re-index crawl.
Spam Boarder
Title and body text are treated differently in Search Engine algorithms. In a title, a keyword a might be as much as 25% of the total words whereas in the body text if it is over 10% it is pressing the limit of spam.
The top sites often have a keyword density of about 4-7% of the total. At www.keywordcount.com you can compare a keyword density on your competitors page to the density on your page to find out how you compare to the top ranking site on different search engines.
Channels
Excite does not officially accept channel submissions. Use the Excite feedback form to suggest your site to their channels (directory listings). You will likely (hopeful) get a canned reply that you should reply back to with a short list of reasons why your site is unique to the category your are applying to. Naturally you must first explore their channels before and be sure you have the correct locations for your site before you start this process. You must do their work for them. Point out where your site belongs. Tell them where this category's line-up of sites is weak. Convince them to look at the areas where your site is strong. How does this benefit Excite and the seekers searching Excites directories. E-mail. Hope. Go on and promote some more.
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