Common SEO Problems In WordPress Themes
June 14th, 2007 by CourtI spent 2 hours today evaluating WordPress themes. I was trying to find SEO friendly themes that I could recommend to my readers. After looking at about 50 themes I have come to the conclusion that almost all WordPress themes aren’t designed with SEO in mind - in fact they are very poor for SEO.
6 SEO Problems Common In WordPress Themes
- Multiple use of the H1 tag. The H1 tag should only be used on each page of a site. Most WordPress themes use the H1 tag multiple times on each page.
- Excessive use of H2 tags. Most WordPress themes use H2 tags for almost everything in the sidebar. This causes H2 to be used nearly 10 times on each page. They should be used for the 2nd most important heading on each page, which is probably going to be your post title. The H1 tag should be used for the main heading on each page, which is probably the name of your site.
- Weak use of HTML title tag. On most WordPress themes, the HTML title tag appears as: the name of your site: category: post title. Since you will often have keywords in your post title, this is poor use of the HTML title tag. The post title should appear first.
- The code for the sidebar often appears above the content. This results in all of your pages looking the same in search engine listings. It also dilutes the power of your content and post titles, because they’re moved down in the code for each page.
- The comment section is poorly setup. Many of the themes use H1, H2, and H3 tags in the comments. This is a huge mistake that would lead to dilution of the intended H1 and H2s.
- Archive and category pages produce duplicate content. If full-text versions of the posts are shown here, it can cause post pages to show in Google’s supplemental index. I would set category and archive pages to show excerpts only, or add ‘noindex’ to their head.
I have decided to start creating SEO friendly versions of existing themes for you. You can find the new, search engine friendly themes by clicking ‘Themes’ in my main navigation, or by clicking here: Search engine friendly WordPress themes.
Requests For SEO Friendly Themes?
Since I’ll be creating quite a few more SEO friendly themes over the next few months, now would be a good time to make a request for an SEO friendly version of the theme you have. Use the comments to make your request.
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June 14th, 2007 at 8:04 am
We use a modified “I love music” theme. It can be found here http://themes.sadish.net/. I’d love to know if there’s some optimization to be done!
Thanks.
June 14th, 2007 at 10:31 pm
I made quite a few changes to the original and posted it to my ‘Themes’ page.
Feel free to take my version and alter it how you would like, or follow my suggestions to alter your own theme. There is definitely some things to fix with your theme, but it’s not too bad ‘out of the box’.
Hopefully this helps you guys out Mark!
June 14th, 2007 at 11:03 pm
Court - I know you are a busy guy, so I wanted to thank you for taking the time to examine. I’ll implement your changes over the weekend.
We keep coming back to your blog for more and more great ideas!
All the best,
Mark & Julie
June 14th, 2007 at 8:29 am
I’m using this theme right now. I’m not sure how optimized it is.
Love to find out. I’ve been switching some things around, adding this and that. Probably screwed something up somewhere, so your eye would be appreciated.
June 14th, 2007 at 11:13 am
I’ll give it a look!
June 14th, 2007 at 8:49 pm
J.D. you’re the lucky winner of the first custom SEO’d theme. Check the Themes page, you’ll see it there. It will be worthwhile to switch it out, that theme needed quite a few changes.
June 14th, 2007 at 8:44 am
Amazingly, I just started noticing some of those same issues and posted about it this morning.
I am using the Mandigo theme. I have already started modifying it to support some plug-ins (like subscribe to comments).
I would like to be able to help you SEO-ize some of these themes.
June 14th, 2007 at 11:19 am
I’ll give Mandigo a look! From a quick look at the code of your site I can see that you have the problem of the sidebar showing up before the posts in the code!
You also have a lot of javascript in the head of your document, as well as a style sheet that’s built into the head instead of referenced. That’s probably what is causing the slow load time and is also not optimal for search. I’ll give it a tweak for you.
June 18th, 2007 at 3:11 pm
I had a look at the Mandigo theme, and the biggest problem will be very difficult to change! The sidebar appears before the content in the code, and since the sidebar was created in a cell instead of a div, it’s going to be very difficult to change.
I hate to say it, but I would consider switching themes if I was using Mandigo!
June 18th, 2007 at 3:15 pm
I noticed some of that and decided to switch. I took the few things I like about Mandigo and ported it to my new theme.
June 20th, 2007 at 9:37 pm
Nice! Let me know if you need any help with your SEO!
June 14th, 2007 at 9:28 am
When you get a chance, can you check ‘connections’ theme?
June 14th, 2007 at 11:19 am
You got it.
June 18th, 2007 at 3:42 pm
I gave Connections a good look Andy, and the theme overall is pretty solid. I made a more SEO friendly version and added it to the ‘Themes’ page. You can have a look in there to find some changes that would help you out!
June 18th, 2007 at 4:35 pm
Thanks Court. I will take a look at it when I have some free time. Keep up the good work!
June 14th, 2007 at 10:22 am
I use http://www.ilemoned.com/wordpress/wptheme-dark
as a base theme, be interested to know how SEO-friendly it was.
June 14th, 2007 at 11:20 am
I’ll give it a look Adam!
June 14th, 2007 at 2:03 pm
I looked a LONG time for a theme as clean as the one I am using, but I have no idea if on an SEO basis if it is any good.
If you have time, I am using the very cool Impact theme found here:
http://www.abelgraphics.co.uk/wordpress.php
June 20th, 2007 at 9:28 pm
I’ll give it a look for you! I’m sure it could use some tweaking.
June 14th, 2007 at 9:09 pm
Wow I love your idea, you are a genius
keep posting I’ll keep reading
June 15th, 2007 at 1:38 am
I have to say that this is a very smart idea and you can put a lot into this that a designer probably wouldn’t. I would be open to seeing what you could do to help my site in any way. Thanks!
June 15th, 2007 at 3:13 am
This is great information to have for my next blog, thanks.
June 20th, 2007 at 9:33 pm
You are very welcome.
June 15th, 2007 at 7:22 am
I’m glad you mentioned the h1 and h2 problem, but I think more important is the placement of the h1 and h2. If h2 comes first in the code, it confusses the se and stops reading.
http://www.w3.org/2003/12/semantic-extractor.html
putting your address in this address will open a lot of peoples eyes!
June 20th, 2007 at 9:29 pm
That would be a huge problem! I haven’t seen that one yet but if anyone has it they need to get it fixed soon.
June 17th, 2007 at 9:13 am
Okay Court, I know you’re right about the SEO of these themes but since I’m not a CSS or PHP guru, what can you do with my Cutline theme?
Don
June 20th, 2007 at 9:30 pm
You know I’ll take care of you Don.
June 18th, 2007 at 8:25 am
Hi Court,
I decided to switch themes. The performance problems I had, combined with the general SEO unfriendliness, and the IE failures made me do it..
I am using a customized ProSense theme. I am curious what you think.
June 20th, 2007 at 9:31 pm
I can give it a look for you!
June 19th, 2007 at 2:04 am
Thanks for sharing your suggestions. I will twick my wordpress blog now.
June 20th, 2007 at 9:34 pm
You’re welcome, good luck with the tweak!
July 15th, 2007 at 7:37 am
We have a lot of the problems you have listed Court.
What to do with it would be great to know.
Andrew
July 17th, 2007 at 3:10 pm
Hi Court,
I would love to learn more about what you actually do here. I came across this article: http://www.mytypes.com/seoblogtemplates/wordpress-seo-guide/
Is this similar to your process? Admittedly I know little about CSS (and html for that matter), but I love to learn. I would find great value in being about to open the code like you do for any theme and tweak it for my needs. Perhaps if you are starved for a post idea, you could give us a “cell phone how to” style tutorial. Take care and I hope you continue to get the recognition you deserve for all the valuable free content you have on here.
July 19th, 2007 at 10:01 am
I knew something about the H2 tags and that having a couple in a particular post would help search engines to understand better what the article is about. However, with my Personal Finance Resources site, it seems the sidebar headings for widgets are using an ” tag. Do you recommend changing this?
July 29th, 2007 at 2:01 am
[…] 作者花 了 2 个小时测试了大约 50 个 WordPress 主题，得出了下述结论，他的效率还是挺高的嘛。我看在 WP 主题中普遍存在的 SEO 问题不外乎这些，定义 Title 的方法，H1,H2, H3 标签的使用和内容重复问题，都是老生常谈的东西，只不过它以一个 SEO 专家的身份给出一份建议，供大家参考。我在 “SEO for WordPress 完全指南” 和 “定义文章标题，用 H1,H2 还是 H3” 两篇文章中也提出过自己的观点和看法，很多方面都还是一致的。 […]
August 8th, 2007 at 7:04 pm
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December 29th, 2007 at 4:03 am
Cool post,in my humble opinon,those problems are mainly caused by designer’s lacking of SEO knowledge.
March 20th, 2008 at 5:39 am
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August 24th, 2008 at 4:48 pm
Dear Court,
I am new to blogging so I am following every step you say. Thank you so much for your instruction..it’s great!
My learning curve is straight up and vertical as I am not a tech oriented person.
I just registered my domain at Proud Domains ( I told you I’m following every step:)…Now I am choosing a theme and then I will set up my hostgator account.
I am going to use one of your themes…a few questions though..
1. What does widgetized mean…should I use a theme that is widgetized or not?
2. Does a two column theme vrs the other choices matter?
3. Should I be using Mozilla instead of Internet explorer?
First post sorry if it is long or stupid
Mark F
September 25th, 2008 at 4:57 pm
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January 12th, 2009 at 2:07 am
Thanks man, good work. It will be really helpful to all wordpress bloggers.
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