How to make WordPress Themes SEO Friendly

Many sites built on WordPress as a CMS use free themes that are more or less visually appealing but seldom optimized to help your site grow. With thousands of free themes out there, you would think it will be easy to find a theme that will do it all without any manual intervention, but that is not the case most of the times, here’s why.

Depending on what you are trying to accomplish with your site, you may fall in one of the following two categories:

1. You blog, but care less if anyone finds or reads it.
2. You are ambitious about your site and do care about your readers, and would like to take it to the next level.

If you are like #1, you can stop reading, because you Sir can use any theme as is and will get by. On second thoughts, you don’t even need a hosted site to do that, register for a free blog on Blogger or WordPress.com and you are good to go.

But if you are leaning towards #2, then proceed with the rest.

To make matters simple, we can divide the aspects of your site design into two parts. First of course is the basic visual elements to make your users want to come back for more. Second and probably the more important part is to optimize your site to be as machine-readable as possible to generate that organic traffic by ranking high on SERPs.

Visual Elements

This part should be designed to help your readers:

• Find
• Interact (read/comment/subscribe/buy)
• Leave only with the intent of returning

There are many free themes you can pick from some of the best WordPress themes that could accomplish this rather easily, and you will see what I mean. Although there are a few base criteria I would look for if I were to pick a theme that will help the SEO process in the long run. Here’s a quick run down:

• What is the sequence of file load or refresh? (Header, Index, Sidebar and Footer is preferred)
• How easy is it to make changes with the theme as a base? (I tweak everything I use, from themes to plugins, so I need to know if there is something that will pose a roadblock)

Also, to help in customizing the theme, find if your theme is:

• Graphic intense, if so, how does it affect site load speed? (Check using iwebtools, Firebug or similar free tools)
• Use any plugins, if so, are they useful? If a theme must need a plugin to work, then I’ll stay out of it.
• Have ample space for large images in a post, it matters to me, but is not always necessary.
• Have sidebars that will take the crap I usually fill it with? Two sidebars are usually better since we can group the sidebar elements if needed into say, “useless” and “worthless”.

Machine Readable Content

This part is very similar to the visual part, except the reader here is called a (ro)bot or an accessibility aid for say, the blind. This aspect of design is usually ignored both by designers as well as users. The most common reason to ignore this part is because “it is not obvious” when you see a theme or a site if it is machine-readable or not. Nonetheless, it is correctable, here’s how.

The process of making a site machine-readable is closely related to Search Engine Optimization or SEO in short, this could be a one-time fix or an ongoing process depending on your requirements. SEO fixes are not complex as made out to be, anyone with time and patience can rework their sites to make more machine friendly.

I created a list not long ago about how SEO could help increase organic traffic to your site. In this post, I want to focus specifically on some best practices that can be implemented to any site and maintained on a regular basis.

• The very first thing to do is to check use your alts and titles, when adding images or creating link, make sure to include alts (since machines can not see images, and only rely on text) and titles while entering URIs (so the bots know what this URI contains).
• Add a relevant introduction to your site, this will help both the readers and the bots get a feel for what to expect on your site. (An example would be my site!)
• Pay attention to font hierarchy, make sure you save your H1′s only for your most important titles, some SEO gurus will argue that your post titles be H2′s, but that totally depends on the context of your headings, if you choose your post titles to be representative of your post (i.e. in context), then what is wrong with it getting some attention?
• Sidebar headings are useless, so don’t waste your H2′s or H3′s there, go with H4 or H5. Save the H2′s and H3′s for sub-titles within a post (I use h3, I think). Those using Sidebar Widgets Plugin know that H2 is used by default, the simplest way to overcome this issue is to open widgets.php file (will reside in the plugin folder under widgets of course) and replace all H2′s with H5′s (or whatever), use the ctrl+h function on a PC to find the H2′s.
• Watch the flow of content, this is key but not usually that critical. Ideally, the content in the main column should load immediately after the header followed by sidebar(s), then the footer (if any).
• Leverage the power of long keywords, use tools such as Google Analytics to track key words or sentences used to find your site in SERPs, turn those into keywords for future posts to help build on existing strengths.
• Watch your anchor text for outgoing links, make sure you not using keywords you want your own site to rank higher.
• Finally, when you write a post, ensure the keyword you are targeting is being used appropriately and is included in the title

Of course there is more, but I will save the rest for a later post. In the mean time, enjoy the tweaking and happy holidays!

This blog post was guest authored by Sunny from headsetoptions.org. When asked to write on wpSnap.com, his first response was “Are you nuts, I don’t even write on my own blog anymore”. Well, with a little persuasion, he agreed.

Posted by headsetoptions on November 20th, 2007 | Tagged: WordPress Tutorials, wpsnap

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