Esther C Kane

If you’ve done any Search Engine Optimization (SEO) work or Internet Marketing work (or both) then you’ve probably read about Google’s rankings and how they look at website themes. And if you haven’t read this, well, let me introduce you to the concept.

Google’s “world domination plan” (sarcastically said) is to provide it’s users with the most relevant information as possible. So, they started off with matching keyword phrases.

The user types in “activities in Seattle”.

Google returns website pages with the phrase “activities in Seattle” and also websites with the words “activities” and “Seattle” in them. That worked for a while and most users go relevant results to their searches. But then competition began to increase.

So, Google decided they would try to figure out what the “theme” of a website is and put that score into the equation to help it decide if the website matched what the user was looking for. So, they created “Latent Semantic Indexing” (LSI) and added it to their algorithm. This means that now Google looks for the words in the phrase “things to do in Seattle” but also looks for other words related to that “theme”.

How can you find out which words would go with this theme? There’s a few ways…

1) You can go to Google and type in the search box…
~activities ~seattle (I omitted the words “in” because it’s considered a stop word)

That little squiggly line in front of each word is called a “tile” and it’s located to the left of your 1 key on your keyboard. This search tells Google to search for theme related keywords for these particular words. Look through the first 3 pages of Google results (organic and paid) and you’ll get a list of words like…

fun activities
recreation
projects
lessons
fun
games
crafts

2) Use a website like Quintura.com – type in your phrase “activities in Seattle” and on the left hand side you’ll be given a list of “related” keyword phrases. You’ll see phrases like…

guide
events
area
tours
sightseeing
attractions
trips

and much more.

Do you optimize your website page for ALL these keyword phrases? NO! But what you do is add as many of these phrases as you can to your website page content. That way, when Google visits your website, they will be able to determine not only an overall theme of the site (through your title tags) but also a theme for each website page (through your tags and the words in your body of content).

An added benefit to Keyword Theme Research is that it “shows” you what other categories you can add to the website to help increase the size of the site, the amount of content on the site which in turn help to increase the traffic to the site.