I admit, I’m not good in designing WordPress theme. Most of the time, I use free WordPress theme from themes.wordpress.net. When selecting WordPress theme, I follow the following guidelines I made up for myself:
1. Title tag should be optimized. When viewing the permalink pages, I prefer seeing the title of the post first before my blog title. I know, this can be fixed by a plugin, but I’d rather have it be a feature of the theme itself. Why install a plugin if the feature is already on the theme? Too much plugin can slow down your blog.
2. Content loads first before the sidebar. I want the search engine to read my content first before the sidebar, because the content contains most of my targeted keywords.
3. Extensive use of header tags. h1 for the blog’s title, h2 for the post title, h3 for other sub-titles. Search engines put weights on these tags, so, I wouldn’t like my blog not using them.
4. Only 1 credit link for the theme maker. I know, I have to give credits to the theme maker. One sitewide link for him is enough. If the theme requires me to link to 3 or more links, I don’t use it. I don’t want to waste too much Google juice just for a theme I’m using. One link is enough. That’s how important a link to me is. 😉
5. There’s a footer. I use the footer of my blog for giving some sitewide link to a post I want to optimize. Others say that footer links are not weighted heavily by search engines. I think otherwise. I’ve been experimenting with footer links on SEO contests before and I can say that it does help a lot. Readers don’t notice those links, but search engines still count them as links. Anyone noticed the Filipina link on my footer before? 🙂
That’s all for now.
Technorati Tags: SEO, WordPress Themes
What a coincidence! It seems like you are currently using the same “LoseMyMind” theme as me. 😛
Agree with you on the footer sitewide linkage. I have been experimenting it myself on my personal blog and it does help a little. It’s not much, but it hey… every little drop makes an ocean. 😉
Help!
I’m experimenting two problems with Losemymind with sidebar 1.0 theme:
1.date entry is from the last year (2007 instead 2008)
2.tags from under the post are not displayed.
Can anyone help me?
I don’t know php…
Thanks, Vic
I still say that footer links matter
how can i make my own plurk layouts?? please help me
This is really true especially if the templates loads the content first before the sidebar, this helps us in having the search engines see the keywords of our content. Great Topic Sir!