Themes...many cringe at the mere word, being taken back to a
time of term papers and book reports. However, in the field
of search engine optimization and search engine positioning,
"themes" are beginning to play a CRUCIAL role in the long term
success of online businesses.
So what exactly are "themes" and why are they becoming so
important?
To understand this, we have to look at why search engines
are implementing this new indexing technique.
With the incredible growth of the web, search engines continue
to look for, and implement, new and better ways to serve up
relevant results while still maintaining a manageable database.
This technological evolution has resulted in the following:
- the use of filters to get rid of duplicate content and
invisible text.
- the importance of META tag indexing (and other tags) being
reduced or completely eliminated.
- the counting of click-thru's
- link popularity and link quality being added to ranking
algorithms
Despite these changes, and there have been many more than
those noted above, search engines are still struggling to
keep up with web growth and provide relevant results.
This has led to the new concept of "themes".
Theme indexing takes into account most of what I previously
mentioned, but instead of looking at each page as an
individual entity, it takes the "theme" of the entire site
into account.
An engine that incorporates "themes" into its ranking system,
looks at the content as well as the theme of a page, the
overall theme of the site, the link popularity of the site,
as well as what other sites are "saying" about that particular
site. All these factors put together determine the "theme" of
the site and page and thereby the ranking of the page in
question. The narrower and more focused the theme of a site,
the better the site will rank in regards to a matching search
term.
Now trust me, this is an extremely simplified description
of themes, but my goal here is not to go into the technology
behind it but it's impact on search engine optimization and
positioning in general.
More and more search engines are incorporating the use of
themes to some extent into their ranking systems, and because
of this, it is crucial that any webmaster who wants to continue
to succeed on the internet understand themes and how to use
them to his or her advantage.
Now that we understand a bit about themes, the question
becomes how does it affect you and your web site.
Quite simply, it means that we have to re-evaluate the way in
which we design our sites. The days of the all-purpose site
are quickly coming to an end.
Think about it. If you offer a wide range of different products
and/or services, when a theme indexing engine visits your site,
what will it determine to be the overall theme of your site?
If a visiting engine can't determine a specific theme for your
site, you will have little or no hope of coming up well for the
search terms you are shooting for.
To thrive in this new world of search engine technology, you
must be able to describe the content or "theme" of your site
in two words or three at the VERY most.
Can you do that? Can you describe the content of your entire
site in two words?
If not, you need to begin re-thinking the focus of your site.
You might consider splitting your site into separate sites.
Using the same look and feel for each site, only different
domains for the different categories of your site. In this
way, your visitors will still feel as if they are on the
same site, but the engines will see different sites, each
with their own "theme".
If you can describe the focus of your site in two or three
words you're already well on your way to having a very themes
friendly site.
The next step should be your homepage. The homepage of your
site should focus on the overall two word theme of your site.
The same two words you used to describe your site. These
should be the focus of your homepage.
All of the subpages on your site, should focus on a narrower
version of the same theme you targeted on your homepage, using
an extension of the same two word description of your site. If
your two word description was "computer hardware", then your
subpages should focus on keyphrases such as "ibm computer
hardware", "toshiba computer hardware" etc.
The key is to always have the same two word description as
part of the focus of your subpages. This keeps the overall
theme of the site pure and focused, and easily picked up by
a visiting engine.
A good example of an implementation of this would be an
electronics store. A smart owner of an online electronics
store would give each section of his store its own domain
name. This could include a domain specifically for cell
phones, another for televisions, another for stereos, etc.
In doing this, he could then focus individual pages within
each domain on specific types of those devices.
Let's look at an example.
Primary domain - www.daves-electronics-store.com
cell phone domain - www.daves-cell-phones.com
cell phone subpages: nokia-cell-phones.html
motorola-cell-phones.html ericcson-cell-phones.html etc.
stereo domain - www.daves-stereos.com
stereo subpages: panasonic-stereos.html aiwa-stereos.html
sony-stereos.html etc.
televisions domain - www.daves-televisions.com
televisions subpages: toshiba-televisions.html
big-screen-televisions.html sony-televisions.html etc.
As you can see, by using the above technique, you can focus
the overall theme of each web site. The cell phone portion of
the site may deal with different types of cell phones on each
page, but the overall theme is still "cell phones" because
this phrase would be found on each and every page.
When dealing with a themes based engine, focus is key. If all
other things are equal, the site that is most focused around
the specific search term, will come up on top.
