Creating theme-based sites is the present and future for both increasingly demanding visitors and Search Engines alike. In practice this really boils down to organising your Website content in such a way that both human visitors and Search Engine robots can easily access your content.

By now you'll be thinking: "surely every Website has a theme? What's the fuss?" Sure, but most Websites have subjects that are too broad and needs to be broken down into bite size chunks, the so-called themes. You may recall the example of the "wicker basket" site. A few themes would be "making wicker baskets", "selling wicker baskets", "repairing wicker baskets" and more. Note how in most cases the themes will correspond quite closely to perhaps 5 to 10 primary search terms. At a deeper level lie topics related to each theme, these will be the bulk of your search terms, organised in groups corresponding to the themes. The theme-based site will be organised in exactly the same way and there really is nothing much to it at all.

You'll find more information on actual page layout, HTML tags, titles, link structure etc. elsewhere on this site, here we'll limit ourselves to simply describing the site's architecture. A theme-based site has a layered structure with different levels.

The Network level

At the network level lie off the page factors determined by the Internet itself, in particular inbound links, as described on out Linking Strategies page. These off-the page-factors can be influenced only to some degree.

The Home page

The home page is like a strongly signposted roundabout: its main purpose is to tell human visitors and spiders how to access your content. A summarised sitemap is probably the best way to achieve this. The sitemap will provide links to the next level, the roadmap pages, as well as the destination pages.

You choose the layout and copy as you see fit but avoid clutter so that the signposts are clearly visible. Remember also that you are not trying to sell anything to visitors yet, apart from the site itself perhaps!

Don't provide any external links on this page yet. Make sure links to the next level (your signposts) contain the main keyphrase of the page it's linking to, in the text anchor of the hypertext link.

The Roadmap pages

The roadmap pages will provide links to the destination pages, in a way that's very similar to the home page. We like to include a little more content on the roadmap pages than we do on the home page, by providing a short (short being the keyword here!) summary of the destination page, under the hyperlink to the page itself. Don't clutter the roadmap too much: the signposts need to remain clearly visible; it's the main purpose of the roadmap pages.

Again, don't provide any external links, ads or banners on these pages yet.

The Destination pages

This is where the fun starts: your deep content goes here, as well as any external links, ads and banners. If the themed Website is commercial in nature, the monetising starts here and not before. You'll find information of how to write destination (or content) pages elsewhere on this site.

But incoming, internal and outgoing links are an important aspect of all your destination pages. For all three types of links, follow the golden rule: stay on theme! Both inbound and outbound links should be highly relevant to the page's topic to be of any real use. Even for internal links, avoid cross linking between pages that don't share a theme.

Gather relevant, inbound links from strongly related pages (search for them using your own keyphrases) to your destination pages. If your destination pages reach good levels of PageRank then the higher level pages (roadmaps and home) will also achieve high PR, that's the nature of the algorithm. But you can build link popularity also from links pages from roadmaps and the home page if you want.

Even Deeper level content

No need to stop at three levels if it makes sense to provide even more detail (often it does): simply use part of the destination page as a roadmap to point to deeper content.

Mini sites (Sales pages)

Many Webmasters obtain good results with single page Website where they offer usually a single product in the form of an e-book, specialised software and such like. Mini sites work well and are easy to create (you can really let rip the copy and sales talk!) but they do have one serious limitation: the amount of targeted Search Engine traffic that can be generated from a single page (often one that doesn't carry much spider bait) is relatively small compared to sites that are rich in theme-based content. These Webmaster therefore rely heavily on traffic generated by means of paid promotion and that can be a real profit guzzler.

The solution is simple: create a theme-based site and use the theme-based destination pages to promote your mini site. This kind of targeted traffic is cheaper and converts better than most paid for traffic solutions.