Are these website templates SEO friendly

Hi,
I've been in search of some mortgage website templates so that I might launch a new mortgage website for my associates. I stumbled upon this company and here is their portfolio of website templates for loan officers;
http://www.lenderhomepage.com/website/mortgage-website-template.php

Question: Do you think their templates are SEO friendly. They've got top notch template designs with all the bells and whistles that I loan officer would want. But it's nothing unless it's SEO friendly. I'm not a programmer so I don't know i don't if it's full of javascript of if their sidebar menus are SE friendly either. You're opinions of this would be appreciated.

Or if you can point me to a company that provides SE friednly mortgage templates, that would be appreciated too.

thanks.

 

If you knew anything about SEO you wouldnt ask that question. Whats the point of worrying about seo if you cant tell that yourself. Any template is seo friendly usually aslong as your urls and cms is accessable by the spiders.

 

The reason to worry is because everyone is talking about it these days. Anyone getting into a website is told to look at how SEO friendly the site is. Meanwhile, we keep hammering people for asking questions assuming that everyone who comes here will know the answer.

Bottom line, City2, you were too harsh and not the voice of the masses here at DP.

The quick answer is 'not really'. They are using session ID's for their pages which usually lends to poor search engine rankings. It can be fixed however. There are better alternatives out there, you just have to search. You mayy want to ask around here to find someone to build it for you. There are lots of good designers, programmers and coders here.

 

The templates look nice indeed, but the URLs do not. Perhaps you can use these templates, to build one for a good CMS that can make SEO friendly URLs though.

You can check if a page is SEO friendly by a few things. This 3 things are the most easy to check:
- Does the URL have a question mark and session ID in it? It would be better to have a site that looks like www.mortgage.com/mortgage/ or www.mortgage.com/mortgage.php then to have a site like www.mortgage.com/page.php?ID=mortgage

- Does it have different titles (the blue line on top of ur page) and if possible metatags per page?

- Does the Navigation look indexable? Flash and Frames can make trouble. The easiest way is just a GIF with alttag, or Static Link to a page. Thats the easiest for Search Engines.

There are more things to look at. A SEO specialist probably has a checklist of 10-20 things with a template, but this is basicly some info to check for.

 

When in doubt, email and ask questions. If you're interested in services/products from a particular company then talk to them. Find out if their hosted templates are SEO friendly. This is a test....you want to see how they respond, and can the provide references to clients who have used their services and seen good results.

It's possible that their standard packages need to be customized for full optimization. Maybe that's how they make their money.

Any template can be optimized if you work with someone who knows what they're doing, but if you want to cut corners and get something for cheap then you'll probably get what you pay for. It might be better for you to hire someone who can create a static site and/or a site that's based on CMS script which can be modified with mod-rewrite.


But what I suggest is ask as many questions as you can think of first. Come back and post here, I'm sure that many of us would be happy to share more imput based on what they tell you.