Your Website Theme
Your 'Website Theme' is what your website is about. Strip away any slightly off topic pages. Forget about all the obscure, far reaching terms you may have considered optimizing for in an effort to grab as much peripheral traffic as possible. Now, ask yourself... "In as few a words and phrases as possible, what is my website really all about?"

Theme Based Search Indexing
Theme based indexing and ranking is quite likely the single biggest improvement in search engine technology in years.

Theme based search brings us to the threshold of a major paradigm shift in search technology. It is having an impact on, and is changing the ways of professional search engine optimization. As this new way of catagorizing and indexing websites becomes more and more embedded in today's search engine algorithms, website owners may begin finding their once high ranking pages showing up lower and lower in the search results.

It is currently the end of 2004, and it's been three years since the major search engines began adopting theme based indexing technology, and still not everyone has taken it seriously. There have been many articles, posts, and newsletters bringing attention to the significance of this change up in the way today's search engine spider crawls a website and the way today's search engine algorithms index and catagorize the web pages and a website as a whole.

Still, few have listened. Many a website owner or optimizer has chosen the easy route of 'cookie cutter link building schemes', and some are now paying a heavy price. All you have to do is surf the webmaster and Internet marketing forums to hear the woes of those that haven't been listening. This of course is particularly true of the almighty Google, 'God of Search', and the changes that have been made since the infamous Florida Update.

Congratulation if you are one of the few that have been listening. You now have the opportunity to ride the crest of a wave of change in search engine optimization and ranking.

How Theme Based Search Engine Indexing Works
Search engine theme technology may sound confusing, but it's much less complicated than one might think. More recently referred to as ' Topical Rank', theme-based search engine indexing and ranking is really quite simple in concept.

When a search engine that uses theme based indexing adds new web pages or websites to its database, the search engine will either retrieve all the information it already has about the existing domain, or it will crawl the entire website and index everything it finds as a single document.

Traditionally, when a web page is submitted, it is indexed and ranked, and then made available for when a query needs to be served.
When 'theme based indexing technology' is involved, all the existing pages are pulled or crawled, indexed and ranked as a single document, and then the website is indexed, ranked and made ready for when a query needs to be served.
Theme-based search engine spiders do look at the individual pages of a website, but then they combine the results and analyze the website in its entirety.

Effects of Theme Based Website Indexing and Ranking
The difference between the way a theme based search engine indexes and ranks a newly submitted web page or website and that of the traditional search engine of the past may not appear great, but it can make a huge difference in your search results placement or ranking.

In order to clearly understand the effect that theme based indexing can have, lets take a hypothetical website and name it countdowntoarmageddon.com.

countdowntoarmageddon.com contains pages on lots of different specific topics, each contained within a dedicated directory of its own. These topics are seen as being related as far as the visitor is concerned, yet pretty much unrelated and diverse in the eyes of the spider.

The domain contains the following dedicated directories:

countdowntoarmageddon.com - root directory containing the main pages such as index, about, faq, contact and site map.
countdowntoarmageddon.com/EarthChanges/ - contains information, content and resources on earth changes, climate, weather and related news articles.
countdowntoarmageddon.com/Prophecy/ - contains pages and artifcles on predictions and prophecy that span hundreds and thousands of years, and information about how these prophesies relate to our current state of affairs.
countdowntoarmageddon.com/IraqWar/ - contains information, links and news reel footage of the Iraq War, as well as commentary and copy on how the war relates to prophecy and armageddon.
countdowntoarmageddon.com/Survival/ - offers pages, articles, information, products and links for the survivalist.
As you can see, there is a common theme holding these otherwise diverse topics together under the domain name of countdowntoarmageddon.com, yet at the same time it is obvious as to why a theme based seach engine spider could be confused. There is no common topic running domain wide that is recognizable to a search engine spider. The search engine isn't able to tell if the main theme of countdowntoarmageddon.com is the Iraq War, Survival, Earth Changes or Prophecy.

Because there is no recognizable theme for the search engine spider to sink its teeth into, when there is a query performed on the Iraq war, survival, earth changes or prophecy, countdowntoarmageddon.com will be listed lower in the search results than if the query topic had been previously identified by the spider as the domain wide theme.

An online department store that sells a diverse line of products, most of which have nothing to do with one another, is a perfect example of a website that is going to have a hard time getting good theme based search engine placement when optimizing for any one specific product.

It doesn't matter how well your optimization is, the theme-based search engine will be somewhat confused as to the intention of your optimization. It will see the query topic as diluted within the domain, and position you poorly within the search results.

Optimization for Theme Based Search Technology
The secret to successful ranking with theme based search engines is simple, keep your domain tight, focused and on target. In order to do this you may have to break your website into a number of smaller sites, each more tightly targeted than if everything were on one domain.