How to know if wp theme is SEO optimized?

Hello,
How to know if the wordpress theme we are going to use is SEO optimized or not? What things to remember while selecting a wp theme?

Thanks.

 

This is very good question. Actually it is not so easy to find good SEO opimized theme because most of the developers are good programmers, some of them good web designers but very few of them have good knowledge of SEO.

The good thing is that we can optimize the WP themes by our self using plugins like Yoast SEO plugin, SEO of images, 404 redirections and many other plugins. We can select the permalinks to be keyword rich like this /this-is-the-permalink/.

I will give you one good example for very good WP theme here: http://wordpress.org/themes/suffusion This theme can be customized in all possible ways from its options.

 

Premium themes are mostly SEO optimized and adsense optimized.

I will refer you these two themes, you can get it from me too if required:

http://www.famethemes.com/preview/?theme=Amzola
http://mythemeshop.com/themes/newsmag/

 

WP default theme are SEO optimized by default. If you are using your own theme, you need to worry about this. Otherwise its fine to optimize the other part of your wordpress website which you can find in your admin panel. A plugin wll allow you to check the SEO checkup for each page of your website.

 

In all honesty themes being "optimized" is a crock of B.S. WordPress configured properly can lead to optimization. Install and configuring simple SEO related things such as page by page keywords, descriptions and titles; help to optimize your website. Putting in images with alt tags help to "optimize" I can review your website and let you know if there are glaring issues if you would like. Just let me know the domain name.

 

There are some themes that are designed to include SEO-friendly features, such as Thesis or Genesis. Generally, the simpler the theme, the better. As for useful plugins, All in One SEO Pack or WordPress SEO by Yoast are both very good.

The site/page loading speed is also a factor, so you should use plugins W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache to greatly improve the load speed.

 

For a brand new website you do not need a cache plugin.

 

I would have to disagree. I've found that even new websites load much faster with the cache plugins. At least, comparing the various hosts and plans I've used over the years.

 

Caching a website while its new, being created, or not even indexed yet, has been known to cause issues. Caching is for websites that need caching. I am not getting into great detail. But if you looked at 100 websites and checked the speed with caching versus proper optimization you will see a bunch of these websites fail with caching when they needed proper optimization in the first place. Sometimes caching is a band-aid for shared hosting customers that are under the constraints of the MySql server and sharing of resources. While this is a great forum this topic is probably not the best place to be giving these types of technical advices as they are not related to the clients current question. This causes confusion for other people searching for content later. IMHO. On over 700 SEO rich websites we do not use caching.

 

That's putting a lot of faith in the stock WP script, which is not known for being very optimized in itself. It's a platform designed to be as flexible as possible, but at the cost of speed, security, and other stuff. If loading speed is a concern, try different avenues, including cache plugins, server tweaks, or adjustments to the content.

For a person just starting out, its important to make incremental adjustments, then observe the results. It probably wouldn't hurt the user to get some site-specific advice.

 

There are thousands of Wordpress Free Themes, and it is really hard to know which one is optimized well for search engines.. However, the default theme looks good and I get good indexing and ranking rate, so it would really be good if you use default theme of Wordpress, if you need a little customization you can do with your default theme and you can give a different look.

 

I would agree with much of the above about speed and loading times. Try to make sure that the design is clean, not too many images, not too much redundant text (ie having the same text in multiple places on pages). Making sure that the linking path is correct is very important using the built in URL tool for permalinks.

+1 to the Yoast plugin. Also, make sure that your images for headers etc are small file size to help reduce loading times.

 

Hi,
The following is a step-by-step method on how to check if your WP theme is SEO Optimized:

1. Install the Web Developer Plugin for Firefox, this only works in Firefox so if you dont have it you better install it.
Download from here:

www.addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60

Code (markup):

2. Visit the demo site or your own site after you enabled the theme.
3. Click on CSS > Disable Styles > All Styles on the Web Developer Toolbar or simply press Ctrl-Shift-S.
Now to know if that theme is SEO Optimized, the Title or your main keyword should be at the very top of the webpage after you disabled styling. Some themes will show your logo first with no keyword. But in my opinion its better if your main keyword is the first one up there. My site had better results in SERP this way. And as much as possible your main content should go before the sidebar and the footer. Hope this will help you
Have a nice day

 

Hi, in line with this issue... someone referred me to place this in my website:

<IfModule mod_expires.c> <FilesMatch "\.(ico|pdf|flv|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|swf|mp3|mp4|css|js|php)$"> ExpiresActive On ExpiresDefault "access plus 30 days" </FilesMatch> </IfModule>

and it did increase my page load time by 8 on mobile and 7 on desktop. Having said that, my website is new (1 month old). What are the possible good/bad effects on this in my SEO/user-experience?

Is this similar to WP Super Cache? should i install WPSC to my site and delete the code I have inserted or run my website containing WPSC plug-in while not removing the code?

 

It is similar to WP Super Cache. It may be redundant to have the code and one of the caching plugins. They actually do a bit more than just cache. I've been using both plugins for years and never noticed an issue SEO-wise.

I say see how it goes. Try visiting using different browsers too, make sure they load properly (there used to be a site that showed browser loads for you, can't remember the site...).

 

There are two really good themes that I would recommend:

Thesis by diythemes.com
Genesis by studiopress.com

These themes are both premium (not free) themes, but WELL worth the money. They expose almost every HTML element you'd want to implement to optimize a site. There is really no need to use a separate plugin for SEO with these themes. The HTML/CSS generated is also excellent (unlike most "free" themes).

But even the best of themes can be poorly optimized if you don't enter the correct values for elements like title, h1, etc. So the theme can only do so much. The rest depends on the person(s) using it.