Site theming is a search engine optimization practice that stresses building web sites that clearly indicate the subject matter or theme of the site.
Major search engines tend to break down websites into subject categories, and to assign ranking and relevancy for these subjects. The overall site relevancy can strongly influence the ranking of individual pages in terms of keyword relevancy. Thus, if a website does not have a clear theme, most likely it will suffer in search engine result pages (SERPs) even for pages that are ranked highly on an individual basis.
While the keyword relevancy of pages is extremely important, often a lower rank page will beat a higher ranked one due to a number of reasons including the strength of the overall site’s theme. Indeed many users would prefer in many cases to click through not only to a relevant page, but to an entire site that can contain information on the related topic.
Creating site silos
One strategy in emphasizing a theme for one’s site is to create “silos” or to structure the site into sections that deal with related subtopics. Each subtopic will be placed in a different sub-folder in your website’s directory. By grouping pages with related topics in the same directory, search engines and users can more easily find the information they are looking for.
Major search engines like Google favor sites that are logically organized. So, a site with a clear theme is enhanced by a structure that is organized in a tree-like fashion with subtopics in sub-directories. Placing lots of different unrelated pages in the same directory folder is confusing to both the search engine and the user.
You can make it easy for search engines to analyze the topics of pages by placing very relevant keywords in the title and keywords tag of the pages. These keywords should be related to search terms frequently used by web users. There are various sources that allow you to search for popular search words and search phrases including Google’s Keyword Tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal).
Creating a themed link structure
The basic types of links are internal and external links. Internal links can be both inbound and outbound. And internal link is a link contained on one of your web site’s pages. Such links can link to other pages on your site, i.e. inbound links, or to pages on other sites, or outbound links. External links are links found on other sites that are inbound to one your site’s pages.
Search engines regard external links very highly in assigned relevancy and ranking to pages and sites. A link from a highly relevant and highly ranked page is of great value, but even greater value if it comes from a website that has a similar theme to yours. At the same time, a link from a page or site that does not match your theme is not so valuable and can even impair your search engine rankings. Soliciting inbound external links can be difficult and time-consuming. One should avoid links that do are not clearly relevant to your site’s theme. Unfortunately, some sites may decide to link to your site without your consent.
While not as important as external links, internal links are usually under the complete control of the site owner. If your site is well-organized, the internal links on each page should follow a logical pattern that strengthens the theme of your site.
Another important element of link structure is the link text or anchor text. While you cannot control the link text of external links, you should carefully choose the link text used from one page to another within your site. However, try not to use the same link text too much. Instead use synonyms or related terms that still have the same relevancy but do not make it appear like you are “keyword loading,” which is frowned upon by search engines.
Clear page content
Of course, for the site’s theme to be perfectly clear to search engines, each of the individual pages should be organized to make the subject matter very evident. Pages should be very rich in not only the few targeted keywords, but also in other related keywords and search terms.
The relevant keywords should be placed in the different page elements including the meta tags (title, description, keywords) the headings, the “ALT” text for images, the linked text, and of course the main body text. The density of any one keyword or keyphrase should be high but not too high. Always make sure the content reads naturally and does not look like you are trying to spam the search engines with too many keywords.
Also, each page’s content should be as unique as possible since search engines are on the lookout for sites that simply copy other page content. For this reason, you will want to be careful when using quotes and should clearly set quotes off in block text.
Making the site easy to spider
Web search engines send out spiders to analyze web sites and site owners should do all they can to facilitate the spidering of their sites. Try to link all your major sub-directories to your site’s main index page (index.html) or at least include them on your sitemap page. You should create your own XML Sitemap for placement in the root directory of your website. There are free resources online that can do this for you automatically (like http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/).
By creating a web site that has a clear structure and theme, you can significantly enhance the relevancy search engines assign to your site. In turn, this will improve the search engine rankings of individual pages throughout your web site. Create a site that is clearly logical in a way that a computer algorithm would recognize information categories. Place pages in the same folder that are clearly linked in subject matter, and include links and keywords in these pages that follow the same theme.
Sources:
http://www.bruceclay.com/newsletter/volume29/themepartone.html
http://www.webworkshop.net/google_themes.html
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