Before setting a theme for the new website, we need to ask:

What is a website theme?

A theme is essentially a simple and accurate description of your site's focus.

If you can't accurately answer in one sentence what your website's focus is, then you have a problem. It's going to be difficult attracting your target audience and even keeping them at your site. If they can't quickly figure out what your site is about, they won't hang around for long.

Web users are always looking for something specific, with minimum hassle and quickly. Your website's theme must be conveyed clearly and accurately to attract and keep that targeted visitor at your site.

So how do we define our website theme?

A theme is nothing more than a topic or main subject idea. Your website theme therefore is simply the topic of your site.

Why is having a theme so important then?

This can be answered in one important word; relevancy.

The relevancy of themes for websites has become increasingly important for search engine ranking with the adoption of theme based indexing.

Theme indexing is a process used by search engines to determine an entire site's primary theme. In other words, your complete set of web pages is indexed as one, and defined as one main topic.

Google has been using theme indexing since its conception.

When a search engine determines (through complex computations) that a website is completely centered on one main focal point, the website receives a boost in relevancy. This works on the theory that if every page of the site is focused around the same idea/subject, it must contain good information about a single topic.

When submitting your website to directories, it must be placed in the most appropriate category. This will normally be reviewed manually be a directory editor but failure to understand or even have a focused website theme, could lead to rejections in directory submissions.

With reciprocal linking, we only want sites that complement the theme of our site (i.e. both sites must be mutually complementary). We'll need to find related sites that offer content, products, and services that will help and interest our website's visitors. This has a double benefit in that it will likely help ranking in a theme based search engine, which uses its collected theme data to detect links that are in or out of context of your website.

So how do we come up with the theme of our website?

Well, that's fairly straightforward. Begin with an open and honest evaluation of what your website is about. You should already understand the purpose of your site, so it's really an extension of that.

Now we understand why we must have a focused theme for our site, let's move to a practical example on how we can put this into practice.

If you have any questions or comments please call me on 0720390184 or e-mail me on webmaster@webcraft.ws.