Vertical Theme Vectoring
and themes-based ranking

(Continued from Vertical Themes page 1)

Which search engines use themes?

One of the foremost search engines to look at the potential of vertical theme analysis is Altavista. However theming is also being used to a greater or lesser extent by Inktomi and Google. You can be certain that more engines are already following too.

As with all e-commerce websites, customer satisfaction is a key area to success. There is a natural, direct relationship between customer satisfaction and profit. The main factor causing dissatisfaction to search engine customers is the amount of irrelevant results that are returned in many searches.

Since Vertical Theme Analysis is designed to present more relevant results on each search, this technology is likely to be rapidly deployed on all major engines as soon as possible, if it works as well as theorized.

Themes sound great ... but what does it mean where it really counts - our rankings and traffic?

Well, this depends upon your understanding them and, of course, in how well they work. What themes should do is to help get accurate results where a word has multiple uses or meanings dependant upon context.

Vertical Theme analysis should greatly reduce irrelevant results, and perhaps virtually eliminate those doorways where a few irrelevant keywords are thrown into the mix just because they are popular words.

In my example of theme based ranking I used the words 'Jamaican cooking' several times. Without theme analysis, the page could end up ranking well on those words. With theme analysis, if the search engines ever learn to look at the 'theme' across multiple pages of a site, the fact that the rest of the site has few if any cookery related keywords will keep our ranking low in those terms.

If we wanted raw hits, say, we just wanted as many viewers as possible to generate high banner impressions on the site, then themes do not necessarily help us at all. However for those of us who want to attract qualified leads for sales, themes are generally a good thing.

Themes used at site level, rather than page level, may lower the ranking of sites hosted on free domains, because the algorithm could detect that there is no central theme to the domain. Larger sites with more pages on a broad subject may rank far higher for those keywords than smaller, more concise commercial sites.

Much of this will depend on exactly how the idea of Vertical Theme Analysis is written into each search engine algorithm.