Maybe you remember the old days of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), like I do. There were all kinds of tricks you could do to make your site show up on top of the search engines, and most of them were accepted at the time. For example, there was a fad at one time that preceded what came to be known as "doorway pages", where you would create a new page for each search engine term you wanted to rank in the search engines for.
This was tedious work that was often outsourced (in which case it became expensive instead). But folks did it, because a search engine click is worth its weight in e-silver. With the potential to have hundreds or thousands of targeted leads a day, having a small, predictable percentage of them turn to sales meant that an increase in traffic was equal to an increase in revenue. Ah, the good old days. Search engines are different now. Just like our phones, and iPods, they're smart. They know when content is duplicate, they know when it has been faked, they know if we've been bad or good... So if you want search engine traffic, you've got to learn the new rules. The new rules of search engines are theme-based. You can go to dozens of quality sources on the Net that will tell you. I promise I'm not revealing some big insider secret. The secret is - how do you create a theme-based site? First you have to know that search engines are a little more complicated than just being about themes. There are hundreds of mini-rules, together called an algorithm, that search engines use to rank sites. On top of that, the rules of each search engine is different. And they change the rules around on you at least once a year. So how can you hope to get and keep a ranking in an environment like that? You've got to think like a partner of the search engines, not like adversaries. You've got to think of what the purpose of a search engine is, and give it what it wants. The purpose of a search engine? To find the best information on the subject you want, and present it to you in an organized fashion. To do this, it sorts information it finds into mini-themes, ranks it, and makes it search-able. What does a MySTTM Topic Cloud do? It lets you sort your information into mini-themes, ranks it (by the frequency with which you post it), and makes it search-able. Topic Clouds speak the same (theoretical) language of the search engines. In part two, I'll tell you how the MySTTM Topic Cloud reminds me of the good old days, why doorway pages are obsolete - and what better, faster technology has replaced them. | 
