Thematic SEO or contextual SEO is a philosophy which at its base centers on the concept that by writing multiple pieces of content on many different, but similar, broad relevant topics or themes will bolster site traffic levels by:

1. Increasing the sites relevance for those broad terms

This is one of those; the whole is greater than the sum of all parts. Put a different way, in a scenario of two sites both trying to rank for a general term, “online dating”, with site A having one article centered around “online dating” and site B has one article about “online dating”, one article about “online dating sites”, another on “dating tips”. In this example site B would be considered to be more of an authority on “online dating” because of its approach to thematic content. In the search world where content is king and relevance is queen putting the two together is the way to establish authority.

2. Capturing more long-tail searches resulting from the thematic intersections created by cross-linking content as well as the content itself

When multiple pieces of content are written on many different, but similar, broad topics there will be intersecting topics that while not directly addressed by anyone of the articles it is actually created by the overlapping segments. To give an example, on a site with articles about “online dating”, “online dating sites””, and “dating tips” it is possible the site would start ranking for terms such as “online dating site tips” or “tips for online dating”.

On top of writing the multiple similar but different pieces it also becomes important to cross-link the articles in an intelligent fashion to further bolster the relevancy that they provide to one another.

Tags: content, seo

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 25th, 2009 at 11:28 pm and is filed under articles, seo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.