• high contrast

Web Marketing Tip: Don't just think keywords, think theme

Added on Tuesday 28 Oct 2008

Typically a key aspect of the search engine marketing process is researching and choosing appropriate keywords, i.e words and phrases related to the business of your website. The idea being that you then make sure these keywords and phrases appear in your pages - so that when those words are typed into the search box - your website appears in the results.

Simple enough idea - and it is an essential part of the search engine optimization process. However there is another important idea we need to latch on to if we are to beat our competitors - all of whom are on the same keyword research bandwagon.

You need to ensure that all of the pages you are optimizing on your site - and which are linked to each other - clearly relate to the same general theme. Although you are optimizing individual pages - if all your pages don't appear to be related to the same theme or topic - search engines won't 'see' your website as being a locus for that particular topic.

For example, my particular expertise is accessible web design - so my best approach is to optimize pages for specific aspects of accessible web design - while ensuring I am consistent about my general theme, i.e., web accessibility.

So I might decide to optimize individual pages for distinct topics such as, the relationship between accessible web design and standard markup, accessible content management systems, web accessibility techniques, web accessibility testing tools, guide to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines - and so on.

Mr or Mrs search engine comes along - indexes my pages - and through the magic of the search engine algorithm - he or she knows that my site is good place to send people who are looking for information related to accessible web design.

In short: work to develop a consistent theme to all of your website pages - while optimizing each individual page to meet the needs of a narrow topic area.

What I'm reading

I'm re-reading 'Information Architecture for the World Wide Web' by Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville. It's not a new book but it is a classic and essential reading for anyone grappling with the problems of organising the content on a very large website.

Only last night my sister Ann mentioned to me how frustrated she had become trying to find a particular product on a well known website. She knew the product was available on the site somewhere - but having browsed and searched to the point of mental exhaustion - failed to find it. She mentioned it to me - as she knows I'm in the web design business and thought I should contact them and tell them I could help sort out their website (nice thought but I think I'd be in a long queue of cold-calling web design companies).

The bigger a website gets, the more important it is for the content of that website to be well organised - and for the navigation scheme used to find that content to make sense to visitors. This book is not about graphic design or 'back-end programming'- it is about how to develop a robust approach to:

• Organising site content into logical topic areas - and how to decide upon an appropriate organisation scheme for that content.
• Creating a navigation system that assists visitors to find what they are after.
• How to manage the process of developing all of the above.
• And much more...

Although on the shelf it looks like quite a thin book, it packs an awful lot of insight into its' 200 or so pages. I've had this books since about 1999 - and it's been a big influence on my approach to organising the content of the new websites I work on. If you feel you aren't ready for the full information architecture experience - I summarise some of the basic ideas in the SAIF publication 'Making E-communication Accessible' (find it on http://saifscotland.org.uk/).

Web developer and accessible web design consultant since 1996.

Founder of the Guild of Accessible Web Designers.

One of the 'movers and shakers in e-commerce in Scotland' (NB Magazine, 2001)

Former Director of the award winning not-for-profit project, The Making Connections Unit (MCU).