What the heck IS a theme, anyway?

And what value does it have?

A theme, succinctly put, is a collection of related keywords. But what is this relationship and how will it help you with your website?

To answer this question fully, let me talk about the three places where we have collections of keywords in Theme Zoom applications.

The first place we have a collection of keywords is in The Last Keyword Tool (TLKT). Here we call this collection a “project” and not a “theme”. This is because these keywords have no intrinsic relationship to each other. They were simply found while we were turning over e-stones, looking for keywords in places that are associated with your seed term.

For instance, we ask various search engines what are the top ranked sites for your seed term and then we extract keywords from those sites. We even tell you how many times we found each term on a competitor’s website (the uses column) so that you can gauge if there is a relationship between this keyword and your seed term that may not be immediately apparent (for example, a converging market).

We also give you an idea of how related each keyword is to your seed term via the LSI (latent semantic indexing) and Bayes scores.

However we do not LIMIT the keywords that come back based on any of these indicators. It is, after all, a keyword tool… and you should get,,, well, keywords!

This then, is the difference between TLKT and Krakken. Krakken is NOT a keyword tool. We do not believe that you should be inundated with terms that are not relevant to your seed terms. Quite the contrary, the Themes in Krakken have very specific uses both in VOMA and in the Blueprint module, and these uses are quite different, therefore the way that we choose keywords for a theme in VOMA and the selection criteria we use in the Blueprint module are quite different.

Let’s look a little further into these differences so that you can better understand what I’m trying to say and why the selection criteria for the keywords in these two kinds of themes are different.

In VOMA you are trying to get a feel for your market. You start by typing in single keywords to understand how each of these terms fit into your market “topography” if you will. In this regard you are looking for “interesting” keywords that are specifically associated with the market segment represented by the seed term, as well as having an interest as to what “interesting” terms are in the neighboring market segments.

In order to accomplish this, we set the bar rather high for cost and traffic, these being some of the main qualifications of “interesting” when selecting the main terms for the upper echelon of your website (silo landing pages). We also set the bar for relevance rather low. In this way you catch a glimpse of neighboring or tangent market segments via their keywords which have a relatively high cost and traffic.

Finally, “interesting” would not be complete without looking at keywords that have a very high traffic, without being too general, regardless of the cost; AND keywords that have very high cost, but not much traffic.

Now you have a pretty good picture of “interesting”. Mind you, we don’t throw away the less interesting terms unless they are truly not relevant. You can hit the “show all keywords” button and get the rest of the picture. There will still be no statistically improbable phrases, no expert verbiage nor extremely long tails. This is VERTICAL market assessment where you are looking for those keywords that define and shape your market.

So now you have an idea of a theme in VOMA. The idea is that it represents the best that any particular market segment has to offer so you get a feel for how many interesting keywords are contained in that market and how much money flows through that quadrant. It also gives you points of departure to go exploring adjacent markets and in this manner you can drill through an entire sector of any market, picking and choosing seed terms that bring back relevant results to your USP and disregarding the rest. The more time you spend exploring in VOMA, the better you will understand your market, the more clear the picture will become and the richer your website base can be because of this.

Now… the Blueprint! This is a completely different animal. It’s sole purpose is to get you ranked for you main website terms (silo landing page synonymic sets) as well as a ton of relevant keywords that will net you traffic in harmony with your USP, ideally folks who are looking for your products.

So the criteria for themes here is to have keywords that are highly relevant to your seed terms, supporting those themes, while at the same time, we show preference for keywords which have high cost and traffic, and throw in some SIPs, expert verbiage and long tails for good measure. There are actually several completely different algorithms that we use to choose these keywords; each with a different criteria so that we cover all the different kinds of keywords in our selection process. Some of these algorithms are quite complex because we juggle between wanting to give you the most valuable keywords (in terms of cost and traffic) while maintaining a high relevance. Additionally keywords are chosen to support each keyword in your synonymic set.

In a blueprint theme you might find as many as 30 keywords pre-selected after a drill, and usually many more that are not pre-selected. We believe the pre-selected keywords best support the ideas that you are trying to rank for. You are free to deselect any of these, and even select any from the remaining list of keywords that are a better fit, either from the perspective of a homogeneous theme grouping, or due to specifics in your DNA.

I’ll also mention here that articles are chosen with the same principles as the main supporting keywords. We look for the most promising keywords that are highly profitable and highly supportive to be articles. The ten best choices are selected and of those, the five best are automatically drilled out and keywords selected as mentioned above. Article themes and silo themes in a blueprint are created with roughly the same criteria.

A blueprint theme, then, is primarily a collection of closely related terms that support each other and the seed terms for that theme.

If you think that this kind of automated pre-selection would be helpful to you, speeding up your website development, not having to sort through endless lists of unqualified keywords, you might want to check out one of our cutting edge keyword research and market segmentation applications for yourself. Quickly, before your competition does!

For more information on this topic visit our Natural Language Processing page.

Theme Zoom Krakken is an integrated application suite that radically combines Market Analysis, Competive Analysis, Keyword DNA Creation, Automated Silo Structured Blueprint and Website Development.

For more information visit Theme Zoom.