Is Your Site “On Theme”

After years of hearing clients, SEO talking-heads, and bloggers say the phrase “is your site on theme”, I decided that it was about time someone created a programmatic solution to this problem. To date, there has been a huge amount of discussion and disagreement about the role of “themes” (what does that mean anyway) in ranking web sites.

Theme Distance Tool

The gist was that, over time, Google and other search engines would be able to categorize sites not just on popularity and keyword relevance, but by themes – some abstract nebulous contextual LSI theme-links authority gobbledygook that could apparently more accurately describe what a site is about than anchor text and keywords. While there is still no hard core proof that this is being done, there is hard core proof that it can be done.

MSN Ad Labs released a series of tools which allow you to determine how your site falls into their categorization scheme. More over, they also determined how particular words fall into that same categorization scheme. So, theoretically, if you have a keyword, and you have a website, you can determine how closely they relate categorically or “thematically”.

Enter Theme Distance. Theme Distance is the numerical distance between the categorization of your site and the categorization of a particular keyword. Virante’s new theme distance tool (I say new, but we have been using this with our clients for nearly a year now, we don’t give everything away for free ya know!) allows you to determine this distance not only for your site, but for other sites ranking in the top 10 for the particular keyword.

Possible Uses

1. Text Link Buying: If you are buying a text link, make sure the site is “on theme” before making the investment. If the search engines think the site is not relevant, you may reconsider.

2. Site buying: Before you make the big investment in purchasing a site, make sure that the spam comments in the forum don’t make MSN think the site is really about pharmaceuticals.

3. Regular SEO: Of course, you can use the tool to make sure your site is on theme, bearing in mind that theme does not equate to rankings. It may be necessary, but it is certainly not sufficient.

4. Frustrate Incompetent SEOs: If you are sick and tired of mindless web marketers who do not know what they are talking about, or spout out phrases like LSI, just run the tool for yourself and skip the jargon. When they ask, tell them that you did the math yourself and that you no longer need their services. Take pictures. Put on Flickr. Blog about them.

So, of course, what is a good tool without a little bit of assistance in fixing the problems it uncovers? This tool also mashes up with University of Alberta’s outstanding keyword collocation tool. This should help you identify some of the extra keywords that you should be including throughout your content.

So, here you go: Theme Distance Tool

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