WordPress Themes matter for being Search Engine Friendly…just like any other CMS
April 21, 2010
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)
Good info, specially for those who think that so long as they have a WP blog that it’s all that matters. Themes matter!
Btw, have you upgraded to 3.0? If so, any noticeable improvements?
Hey Alex –
I have not upgraded this blog to 3.0 yet, but I HAVE done hundreds (literally) of others. (Kind of a case of my own blog not getting the attention…) Lots of improvements and tons of ways to use them. I will be writing about them soon over at my Southern Indiana Web Works site… no time to breathe right now…too many fun (and profitable) projects!