What Makes a WordPress Theme “SEO Friendly”?

You’ve undoubtedly seen WordPress themes that are touted as being “SEO friendly”.  

We all know that WordPress naturally tends to perform well in SEO terms and that there are a variety of plug-ins available to aid even more in terms of search engine performance.  Is there something special about some themes, though, that makes them even more attractive to Google, et al?

Yes.  

Some WordPress themes are a little better with respect to search engine optimization.  Here are few things to look for if you’re in the market for a truly SEO-friendly theme.

1.  Unique H1 tagging on a per page basis.  A truly SEO oriented theme will create a unique H1 for every page you publish.

2.  Good use of H2 tags.  If the theme uses H2 to mark titles, subtitles and subheadings, it’s probably on the right track.  Please note that there is value in using post titles as H1 material, depending on exactly what you’re doing with the blog.

3.  Content comes first.  The best themes with respect to SEO will take care of titles and will then showcase your content to the search engine before having it dig through the rest of the site code.  

4.  Clean code.  this should be part of every theme, but it’s definitely important when you’re trying to find something that will give you the best SEO results.

5.  Internal link encouragement.  The best-performing themes tend to be sufficiently contet-thick on the main page to encourage extensive internal linking.  This has its advantages when it coes to SEO.

If you’re examining a theme and it seems to have all five of these features going for it, you can probably expect good SEO performance from your blog.  Of course, getting the links and coming up with the content are still your responsibility!