WordPress Themes matter for being Search Engine Friendly…just like any other CMS

I continue to get asked a pretty interesting question by folks who are looking to make sure that their WordPress blogs /sites are search angine friendly. While they get to the point from many different directions, the final destination is always the same.

Does your choice of themes MATTER?? or do the search engines just inherently LOVE WordPress?

The answer is simple. Themes matter. Seriously.

Let’s think about it for a second…WordPress is a great CMS (content management system). It is based on blogging and now has expanded to allow MANY other niceties and conveniences that come with having a HUGE developer base. The problem is that with the flexibility of the WordPress framework that allows for developers to use hooks and other tools to have great latitude in design, comes the flexibility for someone (a theme developer) to develop code heavy, SEO unfriendly navigation, less than optimal site structures, and in general, take all of the inherent WordPress goodness away…and leave something that we refer to as a search engine turd in its wake.

How can you keep it clean? Over the next few days, I will be posting some tips on how to construct WordPress blogs and sites that are Arachno-centric (grin). Here’s a quick teaser. The next post will involve the structure of the index page. You can expect it within a day or two.

Before you read it, here is some homework…go take a look at MOST WordPress blogs and see how they are currently structured. Evaluate how they do in the search engines. Google their posts. Google the titles of their pages. And Google for the keywords that are in their title tags…

How are they doing?

OK, now take a look at my next post once I post it…(grin)

Speed now a factor in search results? Well…kinda

With Matt Cutts’ announcement that the speed your website loads at is a factor (albeit a small one) in ranking on Google, my guess is that we are going to see a lot of people doing the right thing for the wrong reason. What am i talking about?

Why SHOULD you want your pages to load fast? Well, because that is a HUGE factor in keeping readers and more importantly keeping them happy. Period. Point. End of Story. This is WAY less ambiguous than the question of why should you write every page about 1 subject and make it clear what it is about. (Write for the reader and NOT for the Search Engines…). This is common sense.

Even at that, Google gave us clear signals that this was coming.

That all said, some people will now have a renewed focus on speed for whatever reason. They want to know…how does this impact me. While it is too new to provide a definitive answer for sure outside of conjecture based on statements from Google (and that ain’t my style), here are my empirical observations to date and I will be adding more as I go along.

Google APPEARS to be using this as a ranking factor mostly on the slowest of sites, and far less as a factor among sites with reasonable load times. So the thing to do is to look at your load times in Google Webmaster Tools under “Performance”, see how your major pages are doing and work on the slow ones to speed them up. Google also provides links to other useful speed tests.

In WordPress, this may mean caching plug-ins, less images on a given page, lighter images all around, etc, etc…you may even opt for better hosting, but something to keep in mind is this. Better hosting is usually LESS of a factor in speed than is poor construction of the theme / site.

I will be detailing some how to’s in the near future so that you can pick up the pace of page loading.