WordPress SEO Theme Defined

Posted on September 6, 2007
Filed Under WordPress SEO, WordPress Themes |

How do you choose WordPress theme for your blogs? Do you pick up one for its look and feel? Do you use one from the popular list? Your consideration may vary, but for blogging profitability, you need a SEO theme. Then what is exactly a SEO theme? Based on my research from various resources, I defined the following facts to help you evaluate a SEO theme:

1. Content first

SEO theme put post content a head of side bar stuff. For example, the theme I use for this site, Modernpaper, put <div id=”content”> before l_sidebar.php and r_side.php: in index.php:

<?php get_header(); ?>
<div id=”content”>
…
<?php include(TEMPLATEPATH.”/l_sidebar.php”);?>
<?php include(TEMPLATEPATH.”/r_sidebar.php”);?>
…<?php get_footer(); ?>

When you open a post page and view the source HTML code, you’ll see the post content comes before sidebar stuff (category, search box, advertising. etc.) This makes your content better indexed by search engines.

To find out if your theme is content first, check how <div> blocks are coded in index.php and also view the page source (html code). More info posted in Feed Search Engines with Content First.

2. Dynamic Title Meta data by the post article title

Some poor themes use the static blog title for all of post pages, no good. If you use the default theme, the Title Meta is configured as “<title>Blog title >> Blog Archive >> Post title</title>”, for example:
WordPress Profit >> Blog >> Archive >> WordPress SEO Theme Defined
That is OK but still not quite SEOed.

A SEOed Title Meta should just include the post title, or post title plus blog tilte only, that would be:
<title>WordPress SEO Theme Defined<title>
or
<title>WordPress SEO Theme Defined | WordPress Profit<title>

Check a post in browser and view the page source (html code) to see what your <title> meta looks like.

3. Put post title in <h1> tag

Open a psot page and view the page source (html code) to find out if the post title, i.e. “WordPress SEO Theme Defined” for the current article, is inside <h1> tag as “<h1>WordPress SEO Theme Defined</h1>”. If it is not, you may want to edit index.php and/or single.php files to make the change, or use another theme.

4. Only one <h1> in each page

Make sure <h1> tag is used only once, for the post title in a page. This can be evaluated by viewing the page source and search <h1> in the html soruce code. It may be necessary to edit style.css and index.php files to make this change.

5. No use of header tags in sidebars

Don’t use <h2>, <h3>, … header tags in side bars. I don’t think this is significant but some people suggested this.

6. Small installation size

Check and compare installation files and folders. A small installation size usually means better design and better performance. Especially pay attention to style.css file. It should be less than 10kb. For example, the AndyBlue theme contains 28 files and folders with style.css 12kb, and Mordernpaper theme contains only 16 files and folders with style.css 9kb. Thus it can be concluded that Modernpaper is more SEOed than AndyBlue.

Comments

One Response to “WordPress SEO Theme Defined”

  1. Create SEO Theme on the Fly : WordPress Profit on September 6th, 2007 6:23 pm

    [...] created one and tested it.  It meets all my definitions of SEO theme.  Pretty [...]

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