In news that’s been way too long in coming, I’ve just launched a new site called WordPress Theme Review. The concept is based directly on the work I’ve done to improve search engine optimization (SEO) in WordPress themes.
Based on the response from Wendy Piersall’s Problogger post, I realized that many bloggers want to use a search engine optimized theme but don’t know how to evaluate the code. I also got many requests to review specific themes. Instead of writing “Best themes for SEO” posts forever, it seemed like a better idea to create a site for this, and that’s the basis of WordPress Theme Review.
The site offers thumbnail images of the theme in use, as well as info on whether or not it supports tags and widgets, if there’s a cost, etc., but the main feature is that each theme is assigned an SEO score (out of 100) that helps the average user know how optimized the theme is.
Bottom line, if you’re interested in getting an off-the-shelf theme (which are usually free or inexpensive), you can easily browse the best WordPress themes for SEO purposes and find one that fits your style and will help you in the search engines.
- Five free, beautiful WordPress themes to help your SEO
- Five more fabulous and free WordPress themes
- What you should know about SoloSEO, a new search engine optimization tool
- Is your blog theme keeping readers away?
- Blog designers revealed: the little white lies we tell clients (and what we really mean)
I don’t know if you theme has to deal with it mainly. Google will find your information as long as it is somewhat verifiable. While there are some really great themes that use SEO hacks, I just don’t think its beneficial to me. WPSEO plugin is by far the best tool I have ever used though.
Good read!
@Hell Yeah Dude: I definitely see your point (and it’s true that Google usually finds good information eventually), but have personally experienced huge gains in search engine traffic just from improving the theme code.
That said, I also intentionally created the site to also be useful (with thumbnails, tags, etc.) even if you think SEO is unnecessary.
Oh no, it’s not unnecessary, I just think that there is a good line on where to end, because you could assume that some themes have really good SEO, but does it really matter?
Your tags are helping you because of the meta’s and title’s. wpSEO basically formats every single one of your pages differently, adding random words from each post into the the meta description and keywords, which is by far the best tool ever. Having a theme that is xml compliant and is w3c compliant (css and xml) will help you “SEO” wise (theoretically)… But I think Google is shifting it’s ways. I don’t do SEO for any other search engine other than Google, and my site just recently hit Page Rank 5.
Good discussion, I agree with it in about 80%. informationarchitects.jp (my idols)
I love simple, clean, information architecture, so you are definitely talking to right man when you say clean code.
I too like just clean looks and simple code. W3C is the thing to aim for but it can be tough.
I was looking for a single column wordpress theme and took me some while till I found one. Still, I think today there are very few people out there that design single column blog themes.
But think about the benefits: I needed this theme for a video tutorial type of blog with high quality videos. It was crucial to have a single column blog.
I agree with everything else discussed over here.
Thanks for this post Sarah!
Remi
Thanks for the information and the link. I was able to download a word press theme. Appreciate the help.
Geoff