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!

Why You Should be Using Free Blogs as Part of Your SEO Efforts (Part Two)

Last time out, we covered a few of the reasons why you should be using free blogs like those you can set up at Wordpress.com and Blogspot.com to energize your SEO efforts.  They’re a good way to build backlinks to your other web properties and they’re too often overlooked by experienced webmasters.  

Let’s look at a few more reasons why it makes good sense to set up those free blog.

Different IPs and IP Ranges.  If you set up a series of blogs for SEO on your on hosting package, you’re going to have a set of blogs sharing the same IP range.  The search engines aren’t stupid.  They’ll pick up on this and they’ll immediately recognize that there’s a strong likelihood that these blogs belong to you and are an interlinked part of your SEO efforts.  How much love do you think Google will give those backlinks?  Compare that to a series of links that come from different IP ranges–links that look like they’re emanating from an unrelated third party…  Hmm, they might see those as the famed “votes of confidence” that constitute a valuable link.

Maximum Flexibility.  Unlike other link sources, you have 10)% flexibility in terms of presentation and structure when you’re putting them on your own free blogs.  You choose the location.  You choose the tags.  You choose the anchor text.  And you can adjust them whenever you feel the need to do so.  Compare that to all of the linking plans that you can set but never revisit and that have limitations in terms of structure.  It’s another strong reason to consider utilization of free blogs to improve your SEO.

You aren’t going to snag the top slot for a hyper-competitive keyword because you created a fistful of free blogs.  However, you can give your efforts an extra boost–and a relatively powerful one relative to the amount of effort required to make it happen–by creating a few powerful free blogs.

Why You Should be Using Free Blogs as Part of Your SEO Efforts (Part One)

You should be using free blogs as part of your SEO efforts.  Those freebie sites at places like Wordpress.com and Blogspot.com might seem like something better suited for newbies than serious webmasters, but they actually create a great opportunity for improved search engine optimization.  

They’re a great way to build backlinks to your other web properties and, in many cases, to funnel traffic to them.  

We’re going to go through a few of the reasons why it makes sense to use free blogs today and we’ll cover some more of them in our next post.  That’s right–they’re a good enough tool to justify two posts!  

Here are some of the reasons why free blogging should be part of your SEO strategy:

It’s fast.  If you’re speedy, you can create your own blog site from scratch relatively quickly.  Even the fastest FTPer in the world, however, can’t beat the speed of setting up a free blog at one of the well-recognized sites.  The blogging platform is already installed, the templates/themes are just a click away.  Customization is fast.  It’s probably the fastest way to get a site up and running.

The root domains rock.  These services create blogs on subdomains, but the root domains have a lot of SEO heft.  Although SEO experts will disagree about how much difference this really makes, no one thinks it’s a bad thing and many will argue that it provides a little extra juice to those free blogs.  That assessment seems to be evidenced by the way so many free blogs tend to get indexed rapidly and to perform well in the SERPs.

They’re free.  This one’s obvious, but it’s significant.  These free blogs are 100%.  Any time you can find a way to boost your SEO efforts without spending money,  it’s definitely worth considering.  Free is good.

We’ll look at a few other reasons to love these free blogs next time.