A theme is defined by search engines as a common topic throughout an entire site. Another way to think about it is that some of your most important keywords are used consistently throughout your site. In an effort to provide their users with more relevant information, search engines developed sophisticated technology that "extracts" website's themes. This technology allows results to be more focused on relevant sites for the topic searched for, instead of individual webpages.

Theme technology is used by some of the major search engine’s formulas or algorithms to index and rank sites. They are used by AltaVista, Lycos and Google. Also, when a Yahoo! reviewer is reviewing sites, sites that have a common theme will receive a higher ranking than one that is all over the place.

Website Design

Your site's design plays a major in role in your visitor’s decision to either stick around and look at your content or continue surfing to another site. Graphics, layout, load time, fonts and ease of navigation can all influence the user. To craft a site that retains visitors, make it fast, clean and pleasant. The basic principal is do everything you can to keep them on your site for as long as possible. Not only can that help improve your search engine ranking, but it will help your sales as well.

Aside from attracting and retaining visitors, your site's design is critical for search engine positioning. Directories, such as Yahoo!, manually review your site before accepting it. Directory editors look for sites with good design to add to their indexes. Any editor from a directory will tell you that a site using "This page is under construction," message won't be listed. Visitors don't enjoy "construction" areas either. Don't submit to directories, or even search engines for that matter, until you have your whole site up.

Capitalizing on Alphabetical Priority

Some smaller search engines use alphabetical hierarchy in their ranking formulas. But more importantly, directories such as Yahoo! and the Open Directory Project list sites in alphabetical order in their directory or categorical listings. Alphabetical priority is a way of ordering files based on the alphabetical hierarchy of the characters in their names. It is generally accepted that numbers come before letters, and symbols (@, #, & etc.) come before numbers. But don’t try to mislead them by adding “AAA” or some kind of symbol in front of your name. Directories are reviewed by human editors who can confirm your actual business name.

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