Hey guys, I've been hearing a mixed bag on WP templates. Some saying they're not SEO friendly..some saying there is a nack to making them SEO friendly by adding/hiding certain things on your template. When I first started my website I was pretty clueless and I used a simple sitebuilder - Then I learnt a bit of html so went and bought a html template, which I now add every page through a html text editor (long!) I just want a nice wordpress template now so that I can add content nice and easily and be rid of damn html coding. (for the most part). I've started slacking now with my site at the thought of html..I'm cool with it..it's just mind numbing. So, the template I would use would be a 3 column template that looks very similar to my site as it stands now and in a similar format. Would changing the template alone account for any ranking changes? Negative or positive? Thanks in advance Best wishes and a happy new year
Any changes to a page or site can affect rankings... positively or negatively. If URLs are going to change you'll have to 301 redirect your old URLs to the corresponding new URLs. If you're looking for a great SEO friendly WP theme I would HIGHLY suggest Thesis by DIYTheme.com. It's used by lots of people in the SEO field like Matt Cutts, Michael Wolf, Rae Hoffman, Blogstorm to name a few. The theme I think runs around $85 for a single copy or $165'ish for a developer copy which allows you to create as many sites as you want with it. The theme looks GREAT out of the box even with no mondification. Unlike most all free and premium themes, there is absolutely nothing buggy about the CSS. The theme is VERY customizable as you can see by clicking on thumbnails here... Just a suggestion... I use it for my blog and absolutely love it. This post on web site redesign and SEO as well as this post on redirecting web pages with 301 redirects might be useful to read BEFORE you embark on changing your site URLs.