fathom - 9:04 pm on Oct 5, 2002 (gmt 0)

Great to see you agree! :)

I think your original example:

It's easy to stay on topic if you are selling what people are looking for. But what about the guy who sells, say vans. He might know that there are 100 times more searches for cars than vans, and he might have much more success selling to the car audience than the van audience, purely because of the search volume.

inferred that this site had no cars only vans but themed towards cars to get large volumes of traffic so the site could push vans out the door.

In reality your particular site is theming towards the needs of the market. Not just attempting to target traffic with the hope of them settling for something they really were not looking for.

Markets are not always politically correct.

plate tectonics vs tectonic plates
customized software vs custom software

which also extends into spelling errors and language barriers

science project vs science progect
optimization vs optimisation

Theming infers that you actually have this content/information/product/service.