ADVERTISEMENT
Kermit from Minneapolis Real Estate asked a very good question the other day about search engine friendly Wordpress Themes that I thought was deserving of a post all on it’s own.
How do you determine if a Wordpress theme is search engine friendly?
There are a lot of factors in determining if a Wordpress theme is search engine friendly. If you don’t want to spend a lot of time looking at code and tweaking it to be more friendly, then you could visit Courtney Tuttle’s list of SEO Optimized Wordpress Themes. These themes are ready to go – all you have to do is upload to your server.
There are two main things you will want to look for when deciding if a Wordpress theme is optimized for SEO: Heading Tags and Page Load Order.
- Heading Tags
You will only want heading tags for important keyword related information – such as your blog posts. You would not want to waste heading tags on things on your sidebar like the words “Categories” and “Recent Posts”, which sadly many Wordpress Themes do, including this one. (Hopefully by the time I publish this I will have fixed it!) You can view where the heading tags are placed in a theme simply by viewing the page source of the theme preview. To fix poorly used heading tags, you will need to make a few minor tweaks in your css stylesheet and sidebar files to basically remove the heading tag and replace with another css tag that will define the font style size to look the way you want it to.
- Page Load Order
I have no idea how to make it so your content is recognized first over the sidebar within a wordpress theme to change in on a theme that doesn’t have this, but by viewing the page source of any preview theme, you can see if the content comes up before any sidebar information. This will tell you right away if the content comes first, which will boost your search rankings.
There are also two Wordpress Plug-ins that you can use with almost any theme that can help boost your search optimization:
- SEO Title Tag Plug-in: You can read the full information on how it works and what it does (and of course download it for free) here. Basically what the SEO Title Tag Plug-in does is it allows you to make your content title appear before your website name. This helps your posts be indexed faster and ranking higher for search phrases.
- Simple Tags: I use the Simple Tags plug-in that automatically creates keyword meta tags based on tags I add in my blog posts. There are many other plug-ins available that do similar things, so feel free to try different ones. You can also take advantage of the many meta tag generators available if you would prefer to do that.
These are just a few basic things to make your Wordpress site search optimized. Continue to build links and write with commonly searched keywords and you will be on your way to ranking high in Google for your real estate website.
Have any other SEO tips to share? Leave your suggestions and questions in the comments below. You might also want to check out this list of wordpress magazine themes to see if there is one that you like.
6 Comments
I try to wisely choose the categories I add the posts to. That these are keyword rich.
The new WP also lets you change the url. Usually this one is too long also, so I delete all the non relevant words.
This is a great list. Page Load Order is quite important.
Thanks for sharing. I’m currently building a new Wordpress blog and I’m finding there is a lot to it! Your post was super helpful.
I too have used Court’s themes but I have to say, he didn’t fully SEO all the themes. The only thing that is fully proper is the keyword (dateless) sniping theme. Basically, he does 2 things.
1. He makes it so that it’s compatible with All-in-one SEO plugin
2. He makes it so the sidebar instead of having h2 headings, it’s h3.
I won’t say which theme, but one of the ones I downloaded didn’t even do #2.
Also, in one of Court’s posts, he recommends an alternating h1 tag. I didn’t check all of his themes but all the ones I downloaded didn’t do this and had some aspects that were hampering SEO (excerpts for one that doesn’t let you bold when it excerpts on your index).
Court gives great advice but it’s always worth the effort to discover and learn for yourself.
Thanks for the heads up Juneau – I haven’t had time of course to download and check every single one of those – the few I did check out were better than most though
Wordpress is a great blogging platform and getting it search engine optimized really isn’t a hard task. Using proper permalinks and robots.txt file to prevent duplicate content and a few other methods can really make a difference. The All in One SEO plugin is really the best bet.