So what exactly are "themes" and why are they becoming so important?

To understand this we have to look at why search engines implemented this new indexing technique.

With incredible growth of web, search engines are constantly look for new and better ways to serve up relevant results while still maintaining a manageable database.

They have implemented filters to get rid of duplicate content and invisible text. They have reduced importance or stopped indexing META tags completely as well as many other tags, and still they have been falling behind.

They have begun counting click-thru's, added link popularity and link quality to their ranking algorithms and much more and still find themselves falling behind.

This has led to new concept of "themes".

Theme indexing takes into account most of what I previously mentioned, but instead of looking at each page as an individual entity, it takes "theme" of entire site into account.

An engine that incorporates "themes" into its ranking system, looks at content as well as theme of page, overall theme of site, link popularity of site, as well as what other sites are "saying" about that particular site. All these factors put together determine "theme" of site and page and thereby ranking of page in question. The narrower and more focused theme of a site, better site will rank in regards to a matching search term.

Now trust me, this is an extremely simplified description of themes but my goal here is not to go into technology behind it but it's impact on search engine optimization and positioning in general.

More and more search engines are incorporating use of themes to at least some extent into their ranking systems, and because of this, it is crucial that any webmaster who wants to continue to succeed on internet understand themes and how to use them to his or her advantage.

Now that we understand a bit about themes, question becomes how does it affect you and your web site.

Quite simply, it means that we have to reevaluate way in which we design our sites. The days of all-purpose site are quickly coming to an end.

Think about it. If you offer a wide range of different products and/or services, when a theme indexing engine visits your site, what will it determine to be overall theme of your site?

If a visiting engine can't determine a specific theme for your site you will have little or no hope of coming up well for search terms you are shooting for.

Optimising your site for search engines is really not that difficult, but it is important: no-one visits your site if they can't find it on first few pages of a search engine.

A good way of 'getting found' is to choose high-demand low- supply keywords (like "free nokia ringtones"), and to create pages optimised for those keywords. (Obviously, you need to find keywords relevant to your website.) The basic guidelines, below, show you how to optimise your pages - how to make sure your site gets click - but how do you find these profitable high- demand low-supply keywords in first place?

=> USE THIS RESOURCE

Wordtracker is a free tool that allows you to brainstorm keywords and determine which of those keywords (if any) have little competition on net (which are most 'profitable'). You simply add suitable keywords to a basket, and their profitability is determined using AltaVista as search engine (the paid-for tool determines profitability using all of major search engines).

Wordtracker is a powerful tool endorsed and used by many so- called search engine experts. You should use it too, to improve your chances of getting click.

Wordtracker - http://www.wordtracker.com

=> THEN STUDY THESE BASIC GUIDELINES

Many of major search engines behave differently to each other when it comes to choosing best pages. Worse than this, though, is that some use meta tags and some ignore them completely, preferring only to rely on page content (with weighting given to words at top of page). Even worse still, search engines constantly change their ranking rules (algorithms).