Internet Marketing Glossary

Definition: Semantic Theme

For Internet marketing purposes, a website's semantic theme is what the search engines perceive its main subject to be. Search engines use this information to help determine your rankings for keywords that fit your semantic theme.

Factors that help the search engines determine your website's semantic theme include: 

• keywords on your pages, and the text surrounding them
• relevancy of content on pages on other websites that link to yours
• relevancy of content on pages to which your website links (both your own pages and that of external websites)
• internal linking structure (does the way you arrange your content make your themes and subthemes clear?)
• your website's link neighborhood 

Attention to your website's semantic theme is crucial for high search engine rankings. Poorly organized sites, even if they contain good content, will not rank as well as those that have been optimized to express their theme clearly. To rank well, your website must have a coherent theme organized by subthemes. Since it's important to rank as highly as possible for the most valuable and best-converting keywords in your subject area, it's wise to plan your website's semantic theme in detail and to create a researched, detailed taxonomy to help guide your content-creation and organization efforts.

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