• Other theme finder tools: Clusty http://cloud.clusty.com/ – type in a keyword and see what it comes up with, the bigger the text the more important the keyword.
• To see the theme of another site: Use this tool: http://www.acmetech.com/tools/adsense-preview/index.php copy and paste the link youre interested in analysing and see what ads come up ?€“ if the ads relate well to the way you see the page , then cool. It helpw you understand how google understands theme

Well sometimes your website can be seen by the search engines like this

http://www.mysite.com

or

http://mysite.com

and the upshot is that google sees two sites and that makes for a dilution of page rank. It also sees identical content which can also have a negative impact on your rankings..
Real life example of this: One of my sites, macintyre.com was hosted on a plain old windows server when it was time to progress I set up a proper content management system on a linux server (to handle the amount of content generated about my celebrity client). Anyhow the previous host had control over the DNS and for security reasons we were going to keep the email on the windows server and the site on the linux server (its all a bit complicated)

As a result, one site http://www.macintyre.com went to the old windows server and http://macintyre.com went to the new server. The upshot was:

- traffic being split up

- chaos on the search engiens as users were sent to a redundant site.

- the new site not being picked up by the search engines until this addressing problem had been sorted out!

Thats why 301 redirects are important

to do a fix on this use this code / if you use Apache

- go into your .htaccess file and add this code and change the web address to your preferred address.

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^villainpuglia.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.villainpuglia.com/$1 [L,R=301]
then all roads lead to one site instead of 2.

for more on 301 redirects go HERE and for windows server HERE

(I would love to take credit for this excellent diagram – but that goes to webmasterworld and one of its contributors.)

As you can see, the more specific the search, the more likely you are to have relevant content for your user. So when you build a site and plan content, its worth planning your site as groupings of subjects with ‘weightings’ of keywords allocated to different pages.

This way you are allowing search engines to catalogue your site more logically and that will end up producing higher rankings.

an example of what im talking about

you have a site called widgets.com
the home page is about widgets

there are 4 main topics on widgets, an deach of those have a page assigned to them

• widget extraction,
• widget placement
• widget location
• widget maintanance

Each of these pages focus on their given topic, so widget extraction will obviously centre on all to do with getting widgets out of the ground, or whereever they come from. This page might have 4 sub topics like:

• widget ground extraction
• widget water extraction
• widget air extraction
• widget space extraction

And of course we can go even further…

• widget ground extraction by water
• widget ground extraction by machine
• widget ground extraction by hand
• widget ground extraction by dynamite

and on it goes… you get the idea.

So as you see you get a pyramid effect and if i wanted to know about widget ground extraction using dynamite – I expect I would land up on your page, after all it is the most relevant page on this subject !
Whilst this is only one componant of many in SEO, its definately one of the most significant – I say this because ‘relevancy’ is the most important mission for a search engine in terms of positive user experience and those who build sites around this strategy will see their rewards in the rankings!

• Flash (Adobe/Macromedia)
• Java and Javascript
• text in images

Are you planning a site where the important content is embedded in any of the above? If you are, then re think your project! Google, MSN, Yahoo and all the engines have great trouble dealing with this. SO STOP NOW if you are planning an ‘all flash site’ or Java driven one.

To see what a search engine sees, use this tool: http://www.seo-browser.com/. It shows you a text only version of a site. Take 2 sites, a badly optimised one and a well optimised one.

Bad SEO: Click the movie | Original Site (Obviously they dont need to be seen widely on the search engines, only for core keywords like ‘click’ where they do well.

Good SEO : Guess where you are!