Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Search Engine Optimization and Themes




"Theme" is the basis from which the site is developed.

How do themes work for you and how are you optimizing your themed sites?

What’s good though is if Yahoo pulls another Inktomi type split again someday with Google, I imagine a well themed client positioned across the board won’t feel the bump quite so severally as those who are following traditional engine optimization strategies.

It doesn't mean that we all have to theme our sites or that engines are drawing from that source for their rankings. It's just suggestion that creating a site based on a theme theory may open a new avenue for placement and new avenues for searchers to find you while at the same time helping to build the sites link popularity and presence.

It seems themes are like pyramids. You put your main general topic at the top and then support it with subtopics in the next level down. The support those subtopics with subtopics in the third level down etc.

Some questions that might be considered regarding a web-site in order to determine their needs of high search engine rankings. Also this will help me in understanding their website promotion as a whole.

How important is achieving a high search engine ranking?
If their web-site is a small part of your total marketing program and you have a strong brand name recognition, search engine ranking may not be critical. If you plan to use your web-site as a significant portion of your marketing efforts, ranking may have top priority.

What are your keywords?
Keywords are the words that they use to lead visitors to your site. Keywords would generally include your company name, brand name, and any other words specific to your company or product. Keywords should also reflect the mind-set of your customers, their needs and opinions, and how they would search for the products and services that you offer.

What is your sites theme?
To determine your sites "theme" we must first understand the content within its pages. Most sites content displays detailed information about their products/services as well as company information. Analyzing the all the text from every page we can compile a list of words that are relevant to their site.

How to determine a theme?
With the list of terms extracted from the sites content we can then drill down to a theme. First, by removing all of the "stop words" we create a list of marketable words to work with.

First we have to compare words that are synonyms and decide witch ones are being search with at the search engines, and remove then ones that are not.
We can also remove words that are common to each other in nature of definition.
We then need to categorize the words that are left and group them in categories that I have predefined from sites that use categories.

Once we have determined the "themes" we can then build multiple sites each one targeting a single category.

By using this technique we can create more effective and relevant sites for the client and the search engine users.

The whole Themes theory is to look at the site as a whole and compartmentalize it. Start with broad content (1 keyword) and work your way down to the specific keywords you want to target. Then link to the topics above and below, but not across, to reinforce the pages with link text and insite link popularity.
The idea of themes are great for everyone the SE's get an optmized site for each specific topic and the user get a more relevant return.

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