SEO Keyword Themes and Their Role in Internet Marketing
Digital Hill Multimedia, Inc.
Keyword Themes in SEO
I often get asked to search engine optimize sites that have been built and deployed already. These projects actually take more work and resources to optimize than if the site was being built from scratch and tend to be strategically flawed sales funnels in internet marketing. SEO should start before any line of code is written, design considered or site map developed. SEO starts immediately after target demographics are defined and personas are developed. Why should SEO be started before the other steps above? The reason has to do with the on-page factor we in the SEO and internet marketing world call Keyword Themes.
Put yourself in the shoes of a search engine and consider what a website looks like to a search engine spider while the site is being indexed. Search engine spiders are looking at source code. What is in source code? A whole bunch of letters, numbers and character strings that tell web browsers what and how to display a website and its functionality. Many internet marketing professionals are not programmers and tend to forget this.
Search engine spiders keep track of every character string it’s confronted with and the number of times they’re presented. This process creates a ranked list of words for every page and is critical for SEO. The words at the top of this list (1, 2, 3, etc.) are that page’s keyword theme according to the search engine. Each word is assigned a significance based on the search engine spider’s perception of several on-page factors (i.e. placement, repetition, Page Title, Header Tags, Bolding, Alt Tags, etc.). Once a search engine has spidered more than one page and determined the pages keyword themes it can combine the ranked keyword lists from all of the pages it’s spidered to determine an overall website keyword list. This final list shows your website’s keyword theme. Google’s Webmaster Tools reports on website keyword themes:
Because of keyword themes it is very important to do a keyword workshop to create a list of keywords your potential customers may type into the search engines. These keywords allow you to predefine what every page’s theme will be and what the overall website’s theme for SEO will be before it goes live. Assign a primary keyword or phrase to every page on your website. This assignment will drive all of the content on that page. Otherwise, you’re crossing your fingers and hoping Google ranks you for those keywords. That is not SEO.
In order to convince the search engines that a particular phrase should be the overall website theme it is important to make your homepage’s primary keyword phrase the secondary keyword phrase for the rest of the pages in the site. That way the overall keyword theme is well represented throughout the website and your SEO attempts will have a better chance for success.
Websites that are optimized after they are developed tend to have multiple pages with no real SEO value or don’t fit within the keyword theme strategy. These pages actually hurt your SEO and chances of high rankings because they dilute your overall website’s keyword saturation with meaningless words.