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Not all WordPress themes are created equal... <br><br>Where some only have great designs, others have also built in great SEO functionality by developing with search-friendly code and building in the fields you need to optimize your website for search. <br><br>And while you can go with any WordPress theme and optimize it for search using plugins, which we will discuss in the next step, there are certain themes that go the extra mile in considering search optimization during development.
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Wordpress SEO A Complete List of Wordpress Theme SEO Do’s & Don’ts
It seems every “premium” WordPress theme these days calls itself “SEO friendly”. They’re usually not... In fact, most are crap, I’m sorry to say. So I thought I’d lay down some WordPress Theme SEO “Rules” or “Guidelines”. If you’re not abiding by these rules, you’ll never get the “Unfunnel says it’s SEO friendly” sticker… sorry, not sorry. Ok so these guidelines will consist of WordPress SEO Theme “Do’s” and “Don’ts”, starting out with the don’ts: WordPress Theme SEO Don’ts 1. Put the site’s name first in the title tag. The title tag should be post title – site title or a variation on that, but the only variation you do not want in a WordPress SEO Theme is the exact opposite: site title – post title. 2. Add a static meta description to pages. I see this so often now: people complain that my WP SEO plugin doesn’t work because the meta description isn’t showing, but in fact, their theme contains a static meta description that is the same on each bloody page. 3. Don’t add static robots meta tags or anything else that’ll hamper search engines. Same as above, please don’t add meta robots tags, “index,follow” is what Google will do by default and if you include it in your theme statically, a user cannot use a plugin to make a page un-indexable, for instance. 4. Use the H1 for the logo, on every page. The H1 should be used for the most important heading on the page. In most cases, that is the article title, not the logo, on every page but the homepage.
5. Don’t hide links in the theme. This one might be obvious but still: don’t hide any links in your theme that don’t belong there. One link to you as the theme creator: ok, anything else: nonsense. 6. Have sidebars above the content in your code. In an ideal world, the first content in the HTML is the content of the page, followed by related navigation, then sidebars, then site navigation, then utilities like sitemaps and privacy statements. Having sidebars above the main content of a page though is a straight violation of the WordPress SEO Theme guidelines. WordPress SEO Theme Do’s 1. Allow taxonomy descriptions to be shown. In most themes, taxonomy archives are boring as hell. They have no unique content whatsoever and just contain the latest posts for that taxonomy. WordPress has a core feature that allows for a description of a taxonomy though, and a good WordPress SEO Theme should allow the user to display that description, topped by an H1 with the Taxonomy title in it. 2. Show excerpts on archives. Archive pages with full-length posts are not really any good for SEO, doing so on your frontpage for the last few posts might have some usability benefit, allowing users who come to your homepage to read posts immediately, for archives that benefit doesn’t outweigh the SEO. 3. Allow for breadcrumbs. Most any SEO these days will tell you breadcrumbs are a nice and easy way to create a good internal linking structure (provided the user uses the taxonomies etc. right of course) so embedding breadcrumbs is important. Making sure they work with custom taxonomies is important too!
4. Use the post title as the first anchor text. Don’t use “read more” or “continue reading” as the first anchor text towards a post, not in the body, not in widgets, nowhere. Just use the post title. 5. Clean, cleaner, cleanest. Your theme code should be as clean as humanly possible, don’t overdo it on divs etc. for styling, just keep it simple and solid, to allow for fast page loads and easy crawling. Unnecessary Functionality I’ll say this again and again…There’s no need to put SEO functionality for titles and descriptions in your theme. There are a couple of great SEO plugins that do this better than your theme ever can. While I wouldn’t take away any points for it, I’d rather you focus on great coding for your Wordpress theme. WordPress SEO Theme Scan Starting today, I’m offering a WordPress SEO Theme scan. I’ll review a WordPress theme and tell you whether it’s SEO friendly or not. We’ll cover that in a post on the Unfunnel website, in a similar fashion to my user experience audits with a thorough breakdown versus some goofy rating. If you’re the author of the Wordpress theme you’ll get a badge to use on your own website that you can use to show off my rating. I’ll start this service at the introductory price of $300 and it’ll go up to $450 later on. If you’ve got multiple themes you’d like me to review, contact me for pricing.
