Writing Themed Web Content

When an expert writes an article on a topic that they know well, that author will automatically use a set of words and phrases that are specific to the topic they are writing about. e.g. if a doctor was writing about irritable bowel syndrome, they would naturally use words and phrases like:

bowel, syndrome, symptoms, irritable, test, cause, disease, gas, ibs, pain, diarrhea, constipation, diet, treatment, health, diagnosis, digestive, cramping and diarrhea, irritable bowel syndrome, inflammatory bowel disease, abdominal pain, bowel movement, soluble fiber, milk products, large intestine, dairy products

The expert author would use these words and phrases because they are required to accurately write about Irritable Bowel Syndrome.

If we take another example, an optician writing about myopia (short-sightedness) would naturally use words like:

age, child, clearly, condition, contact, correct, distant, eye, eyes, focus, front, glasses, health, information, lenses, light, lose, myopia, near, nearsightedness, normal, objects, people, reading, retina, sightedness, sign, treatment, vision, front of the retina, light entering the eye, contact lens, contact lenses, refractive error, eye doctor, visual acuity, vision problem, refractive errors, reading glasses, distance vision, refractive surgery, distant objects, eye drops, vision problems, dry eye

You see, there is a specific set of important theme words and phrases for just about any topic you care to write about. When the search engines process the content on your site, do they know what that content is about? The more of these niche-centric words and phrases it finds, the more certain it can be of the topic of your content.

I have been working online for around 10 years now, and seen many changes to the way search engines work. For a long time, the Internet Marketing Gurus would teach people to optimize a page around a main keyword phrase, and sprinkle in a few extra synonyms for good measure.

A page written like that would not appear natural to someone who read the article or to the search engines. Words and phrases that should be there are just missing.

As the search engines have become better at discerning quality content, they have developed algorithms that sift out a lot of the rubbish before it ever hits the SERPs.

So, how do the search engines do it?

Well, probably in the same way that they can display RELEVANT ads on your website - using technology that they have acquired and refined. For those who remember, Google didn't create Adsense, they bought semantic technology from Applied Semantics back in 2003. You can read the press release here if you want to: Google Acquires Applied Semantics.

An interesting point in that Press Release is this:

"Applied Semantics is a proven innovator in semantic text processing and online advertising," said Sergey Brin, Google's co-founder and president of Technology. "This acquisition will enable Google to create new technologies that make online advertising more useful to users, publishers, and advertisers alike."

Also of particular interest to this article is this paragraph:

“Applied Semantics' products are based on its patented CIRCA technology, which understands, organizes, and extracts knowledge from websites and information repositories in a way that mimics human thought and enables more effective information retrieval”

Now that is interesting....

Could Google be analyzing the content to see whether it contains topic-related words and phrases?

I think you'll find that the evidence is there, and you don't need to look too hard.  In this video that I recorded some time ago, you can see some of the results of my own theme research.  Note that the tool I use in the video is now available (Web Content Studio), and you can also get access to the Gestational Diabetes Report mentioned in the video as well as other Theme Reports here.

If you are a content publisher, you need to start thinking about themeing your content.

Why?

Well, put simply, there are billions of web pages out there, on a whole stack of topics. A search engine like Google is only interested in the very best of the articles on any one topic so if yours does not cut the mustard, it will end up in the supplementary index for the terms you are targeting.

Let's suppose that you do a search of Google for a phrase you want to target, and you see that there are only 10,000 competing pages. That's not too bad is it? You may think that it is not worth all the effort of themeing your content as you can get to the top with relatively few quality links pointing to your page.

Well, I want you to rethink. I want you to watch the next video, which may well change the way you think about competition.

With such a high percentage of web pages being consigned to the supplemental index for its main targeted phrases, its not looking good for web content publishers is it?

Well, if you go back up this page and re-watch the video on "Is LSI Important", you will get a good clue as to what you need to do with your content to make it into the Google Authority Set for that niche.

I have written two PDF reports that you can get for free.

The first one is called Google Authority Sets. This report is a real eye opener. Not only does it go into more detail on which pages Google chooses for the main index in a variety of niches, but it also shows that on average, ALL of the pages included in the main index (for all of the examples in the report) have a high level of themeing. i.e. on average, every page that Google included in the main indexed had a high level of theme words and phrases related to the main search phrase.

The second Report in this pack is called "Ranking Without Page Rank or Links", and looks at a few examples from my own website, where my page outranks pages with higher Pagerank and inbound links. My pages are well-themed, and they punch above their weight class. Not only that, but my pages get found for many different long tail phrases, usually 100+ per page.

You can Download these free Reports without having to supply your email address or details. Also, I have just updated my Creating Fat Content Course (150+ meaty pages) and made it available for free. Download Creating Fat Content for 2011.

Please feel free to leave comments below.