EXCITE

Recognizes and supports META tags? YES (they now claim to support the META description tag and will use text you include there as your site description)

Are searches case sensitive? NO

Does a spider index the site? YES (but only the main page index. htm page --a separate spider may come back to spider internal pages).

Uses data entered on submission form only? NO

Is page popularity a factor? YES

Alphabetical ranking used? NO

Keyword weight plays a role? YES

Title tag considered for relevancy? YES (multiple title tags technique has been effective)

Prominence of keywords in title tag important? YES

Frequency of keywords in title tag important? NO

Comment tag considered for relevancy? YES

Max. length of title accepted UNKNOWN

Max. length of keyword META tag UNKNOWN

Max. length of description field you can submit N/ A

How to check to see if you're listed Type the full URL: http:// www. company. com

How to check your link popularity link: www. company. com

E-mail support comments@ excite. com

Total documents indexed 140,000 in the Excite channels 60 million total in search engine

Total page views 58 million page views per month as of April 1999.

Add URL http:// www. excite. com/ info/ add_ url

Excite has very grown rapidly. This means a top ranking in Excite will generate significant traffic to your Web site. More importantly, Excite is the default search engine for Netscape's

NetCenter and for AOL's NetFind search engine, and though WebCrawler maintains a smaller and separate database of Web sites, it uses the Excite ranking algorithm. This means, for the most part, that a top ranking in Excite means a top ranking in four other large and important search engines. Read on.

Excite's stated goal is to provide easy-to-access, relevant information to searchers. If you search for the keyword "NY Times," chances are you are looking for the NY Times' Web site, not one of the dozens of sites that quoted something from the paper that day. For that reason, Excite pre-lists sites that it hopes will be most relevant to your searches in a special colored section, before
returning matches from its index based on its ranking algorithm. Human editors choose these pre-selected search matches.

Our first question about these results was: "How can we get a Web site to be one of these first returned sites in this special colored section?" The answer from Excite was, "You can't ask to be listed in this first section." Excite reserves these slots for sites that it feels are naturals or obvious Web sites for these keyword searches. Not all keywords will have a special section with Excite-selected sites, but some will.

We recently called the folks at Excite to discuss a listing problem and had the good fortune to speak with one of their network support people. Here's what we learned from this recent discussion:

1. Excite only spiders your default page. In other words, the main home page of your site, usually the index. htm page is the only page that will be spidered by Excite.

2. In some cases Excite will send a second spider back to your Web site to spider the internal pages of the Web site. The Excite contact would not reveal what caused a second spider visit, though we expect is has something to do with the freshness of a Web site (how often the page is changed).

Here's what this discussion meant to us: Only one page of your Web site will likely achieve high rankings on Excite - your index. htm or default page. If you build doorway pages to achieve top rankings in Excite, you should register a separate domain name for those doorway pages since a page contained within a folder is unlikely to be considered by Excite.

In other words, if your doorway page is contained in a folder off your root domain or even in the root directory of the primary domain such as:http:// www. primarydomain. com/ doorwaypage. htm, http:// www. primarydomain. com/ folder/ doorwaypage. htm the page is unlikely to be considered by Excite since it favors only the default pages. New domain names can be registered with Network Solutions for $70 each. Considering that each domain can hold a doorway page that could attain top 10 rankings on several keywords, the payoff should easily cover the cost of the additional domain.

Another technique is to use a new domain - a separate but similar URL - for major internal sections of your Web site. For instance, let's say you've built a Web site to sell your special brand of widgets. Let's pretend that you sell four primary types of these widgets:

steel widgets, cardboard widgets, pine widgets , plaster widgets Imagine that the main page of your Web site discusses your company background and then offers links to separate pages that each describes one of your primary lines of these widgets. You could build your site as follows:

Main home page URL: www. widget. com

Sub page that discusses steel widgets: www. steel-widget. com
Sub page that discusses cardboard widgets: www. cardboard-widget. com
Sub page that discusses pine widgets: www. pine-widget. com
Sub page that discusses plaster widgets: www. plaster-widget. com

Each sub page would have a default page or an index. htm page, though they would appear to be part and parcel of the same Web site. However, each of these new domains has a chance to achieve its own ranking in Excite. The ancillary benefit is that you can promote each of the unique URLs individually in all the search engines.

In this example, you could build top10 rankings for each of five separate domain names. Nobody would have to know that the page hosted on steel-widget. com was not originally designed to be the "home page." For all anyone knows, this could be a steel widget making company that also makes pine, plaster and cardboard widgets.