Using Themes in SEO

Using Themes in SEO

The Search Engines use a number of algorithms to determine the natural listing position for your site and pages. By helping the search engine understand the theme of your site it is better able to decide when to display a link to your pages in response to a users search query.

There are 5 key factors that influence the theme of a site:

The Domain Name
The Page Title
The Meta Tags
The Page Content
The Anchor Text of Inbound Links

If we look at a fictitious site about mobile phones and see how each of these can be used to our advantage.

The first step is to determine the best keywords and phrases to use. Let’s assume that the most appropriate for our site is ‘mobile phone’.

The Domain Name

It is always beneficial to have your main keywords included in the domain name, so mobilephone.co.uk would be a good choice.

The Page Title

The Title in the page code should be one of the first lines that the search engine robot sees when it ‘reads’ your site. This is the wording that appears in the uppermost line of the browser window. Something like ‘Mobile Phones at fantastic prices’ might be suitable and links to the domain name.

Another consideration with the Title tag is that of users adding the page to their favourites. This process takes the Title tag as the default description which makes it easier to understand when looked at in the list later.

The Meta Tags

These tags are of questionable use from a search engine ranking point of view now as it thought that these are no longer of interest to them. However the Description is used by the search engine to give a snippet in the listings to help the user decide if this page is worth viewing and, therefore, the wording is picked up by them. A 2 or 3 line paragraph that started and ended with ‘Mobile phone’ would be worth while from both a visual user point of view and to add to the ‘theme’

The Page Content

It is accepted that pages should be content rich and appropriate to the subject but including multiple references to our keyword ‘mobile phone’ would emphasise the theme once again. However it must be remembered that a human will read the text ultimately and it must therefore read fluently to ensure that a site conversion is achieved.



The Anchor Text of Inbound Links

It is widely accepted that links to your site from other sites is a key factor in determining its ranking. It has been common practise, in the past, to gain vast numbers of these from ‘link farms’ – sites set up simply to provide one way inbound links from otherwise worthless websites. The search engines have wised up to this practise and now value inbound links by the Page Ranking of the originating site. So for example a site such as bbc.co.uk, which has a Page Rank of 9/10 would provide an extremely valuable link to you. At the opposite end of the scale are sites with zero page rank which could in fact harm your own value in the eyes of the search engines.

So with that in mind there are some good ways to enhance the value of your good ranked links.

Typically links to your site would simply be the web address with a hyperlink. In our example of mobilephones.co.uk that’s not too bad at our key word is included in the domain name, but that’s not always the case.

A better alternative would be to have a short piece of text, describing your business and including your keywords, with the whole piece hyperlinked. This reinforces that the destination site is about mobile phones.



Conclusion

The processes described here are not ‘black art’, they are simply logical steps to ensure that the search engines understand exactly what you are trying to promote and give them guidance as to when they should be display your site as a suitable link.

The search engines ultimate aim is to provide its users with the best and most appropriate links to ensure that they keep coming back, using them as their search engine of choice.

All you are doing with themes is helping the search engines with that process.



If you would like help with making your website produce sales and marketing the results from SEO, SEM and PPC you are looking for call Roy Gough on 0777 556 1664 to discuss the cost effective options available.