About AV & Themes

What's best for AV and others?

[Vann]

I am a newbie to the forums..so I started by combing through hundreds of previous posts relating to SEO in Altavista as well as others. The recurring key to success seemed to be Themes as the magic bullet in SEO in AV as well as others. In fact, many references have been made to the famous article at Search Engine World where the author states he had good placement using the SAME set of pages across the engines due to the use of themes, defying what seems to be the deep rooted practice of optimizing pages for each individual engine. In fact, some posts indicated that after creating a theme, their site ranked better that others with 10 times more link popularity.

Basically I am left with 2 questions:

1) Is utilizing a Theme still the magic bullet for AV....

2) IS there any such thing as having ONE themed site (the same set of 5-10 pages) do well across all engines for the same pages, or is per engine optimization still the only way to go for the best results?

Thanks for any input!

[DaveAtIFG]

Welcome to WmW, Vann! Unfortunately, there is presently no "Magic Bullet" for AV that I'm aware of. AV's been in turmoil since their recent arrangement with GoTo, circa 11/2000. Indications are they are basing rankings heavily upon Looksmart listings but reports are mixed about this.

Due to the collapse in web advertising, most engines are strugging financially. PPC programs abound to compensate and search quality plays second fiddle presently. IMHO, themes will become significant again, after revenue issues are resolved.

I've seen a few sites appear top 10 on most engines for competitive phrases with what appears to be the same page. I don't believe it's due to themes, more likely the right combination of the basics. As I build unique pages, I often find what works well on one engine also works well on several others, but rarely works on all, or even most of them.