48 SEO WordPress Themes And Why You Should Use One
November 27th, 2007 by Court
The time has come to unveil 28 new search engine optimized WordPress themes! I’ve held off on posting the new themes because I needed to create a better system for archiving them. That system is now ready and you can find the themes in a brand new section of the site here: SEO WordPress Themes. There are now 48 total themes and I have 20 more than are in production.
The themes now all have tags so that you can find what you’re looking for more easily. If you want a 2 column theme, click the 2 column tag. If you want a dark theme, go to the dark tag. Right sidebar, go to right sidebar. You get the idea. To find the tags, go to the theme section, and you will find the tags in the upper right corner. Look for the red arrow on the image below:
The Reason I Optimized The Themes
These themes are here to help you to increase search engine rankings. When I did an SEO overhaul on my own site I moved from page 60 to page 4 for the keyword internet marketing. I’m now on page 2 and I can all but guarantee that I wouldn’t be there with a stock theme.
There are a lot of factors that contribute to a good search engine ranking. I’m not going to go into all of them here because I don’t think you want to read 20,000 words today, but here are some of the major ones you should know about:
- Overall link popularity/site authority
- Keyword use in title tag
- Inbound link anchor text
- Link popularity within your site itself
- Keyword use in text of the page in question
Let’s Drop The SEO Jargon And Talk About What’s Actually Going On
When Google visits your site, they are going to take a look at every page they can find. Google will then take a snapshot of each of your pages to store in their system. When a person does a search for a word or phrase, Google returns a list of pages they have found that have that keyword on them.
Pages that have placed their keyword properly will always come up higher than pages that don’t. This is where you can run into trouble if you have a WordPress blog - there are truthfully a lot of things that could have been done better by WordPress. If you’re running a stock theme you’re going to get less traffic than you deserve.
Specifically What I’m Talking About When I Say Trouble
Let’s take a look at my theme versus the standard themes that you can download and use. For the purpose of this example, let’s take a look at a post that I wrote called, “Search Engine Optimization For Yahoo.” I wanted that post to rank well for the exact term in the title, ‘Search Engine Optimization For Yahoo’, for which it’s on the first page in Google.
What I want to look at is exactly what happens when I publish a post versus what happens when you publish a post on a site that’s running a theme that isn’t optimized.
Page Titles
The first thing I want to look at is what appears in the page title (HTML title), which appears in the blue bar in the top of the browser. Here’s what appears there for my site:
The keyword I want to rank for is the first thing there. Here’s what it would look like if I wasn’t running an optimized theme that was set up for the All-In-One SEO Pack plugin:
See what happens to the keyword we’re trying to rank for? It gets shifted to the right and is placed behind the title of your blog itself. Example 1 will outrank example 2 if other ranking factors are the same. The SEO themes are altered to fix this - we have installed for you the header code for the All-In-One SEO Pack plugin.
Page Headings
You should also be using your keywords as headings within your pages. WordPress blogs do this naturally, except your WordPress theme can really mess up this process. Most themes use heading tags on very unimportant words like ‘categories’ and ‘archives’. This is a huge mistake and is one of the major issues I’ve tackled with my SEO themes.
You want your keywords to appear in headings properly. This happens automatically if you’re using one of the SEO themes I’ve put together for you. All you have to do is use your keywords in your post title.
Hidden Links
An easy way to destroy your chances of getting ranked well is to link to a bunch of terrible sites. I can’t tell you how many themes I’ve found that have hidden links in them. These are usually to illegal pharmacy or gambling sites. You don’t want to end up linking to these, and for this reason we go through the WordPress themes to get rid of the links you don’t know about.
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November 27th, 2007 at 4:52 pm
All I can say is sweet action. Why go and download these at some other site when you can get them straight up optimized right here. I think these will come in handy for my next projects. Thanks Court!
November 27th, 2007 at 5:14 pm
Again, you have provided another great resource for us, thankyou. I SU’ed and BZ’ed the post to get the word out.
November 27th, 2007 at 9:01 pm
Hi, Can you confirm that these display well in both IE6 IE& and firefox. I use firefox but most of my readers use IE and I was horrified to find the IE breaks my current theme so Im looking to change. Also is there any tool which gives you a list of the custom code you’ve added to your existing theme e.g. tracking code
Thanks
November 27th, 2007 at 9:34 pm
Hi Lissie!
If you run into a breakage problem with any of these themes in IE I would be happy to fix it for you!
I’m not aware of a tool that lists your custom coding so you’ll have to make a backup of your tracking code.
November 27th, 2007 at 9:36 pm
Now there’s an idea for a technical person! Just because Iput the code in doesn’t mean I remember why ! A tool that parsed and then gave me a list back of all the hacks would be fantastic!
November 27th, 2007 at 9:45 pm
That would be very cool! I just emailed you what should be your tracking code! Hopefully that helps.
November 27th, 2007 at 9:08 pm
Still kind of wounded for losing my site yesterday , but I am looking at new ones all the time Court, many dont seem to function with my WordPress version, but still trying
November 27th, 2007 at 9:41 pm
Great points Court. One of the first themes I tried had all my pages with font attributes in the description in Google searches.
It looked nice but that probably put me a month behind in getting traffic.
November 27th, 2007 at 10:30 pm
Court,
I just want you to know that I think these are great. If anyone comes to this site then I plead that they use one of these if they want their theme to be successful. It would be so horrible if you put in countless hours and dollars only to have your site hold you back. It can really be your best friend or worst enemy. So bloggers make it easier on yourself because this helped me to get on page two very quickly for a very competitive keyword. I think that you have helped it to give the little guy a fighting chance Court.
November 27th, 2007 at 10:55 pm
I was looking through the themes earlier today and was thinking about changing themes. I have been using other free themes for some time now and I have never thought about hidden links.
November 28th, 2007 at 6:18 am
Hi, Court …;P
Thanks for the themes. But, I have problem with this Nobus theme.
After downloading and extracting the files, I saw - Archive: nobus.zip
replace nobus/_notes/dwsync.xml? [y]es, [n]o, [A]ll, [N]one, [r]ename: NULL
(assuming [N]one)
Hope you can help, thanks.
By the way, I love the Black & White theme. I have already downloaded for my another new blog too.
November 28th, 2007 at 11:39 am
Hi Vedis! It sounds like you just extracted more than once and it’s asking if you want to replace the extracted file from the first time around. Select [y]es by hitting ‘y’ on your keyboard and you’ll be set.
I just checked Nobus in IE6, IE7, Firefox, Safari, and Opera just to make sure, and it checks out perfectly.
Hopefully this helps!
November 28th, 2007 at 6:54 am
I think in taking this step you’ve hit on a very important issue that can be easily overlooked. Bloggers are not all web developers so many times, the unseen code is what holds them back from greatness.
November 28th, 2007 at 7:03 am
I’ve been trying to find a good theme that’s made with SEO in mind. The one I’m running on now came from Doshdosh, but has problems when looked at in IE6. The tag cloud also runs into the margins. I’ll check one of these out and see how we do. Thank you!
November 28th, 2007 at 10:16 am
To nitpick a moment, “industrial” is spelled wrong in the footer of the Industrial theme.
I ran several of them through my test system last night. They all looked good in IE6/7 and Firefox 2.0. Thanks for putting these out.
Here’s a SEO HTML coding question for you though. I notice you’re using H2 in your internal post sub-headings. Do you recommend this over H3 or less or bolding for SEO purposes?
November 28th, 2007 at 11:30 am
Thanks Frank! I got that issue fixed.
I actually use a combination of H2 and H3 for that. Most of the time I use H2 if there’s anything that people will search for in the heading.
November 28th, 2007 at 2:12 pm
Court-
Awesome work. Being a geek myself, I have a couple clarifying questions:
I keep my category names short (leasing). By your above suggestion, should I be using my entire keyword (leasing Minnesota investment property)?
In your Yahoo example, what is the page heading that the standard theme would put in versus what do you want for SEO?
November 28th, 2007 at 2:40 pm
If you wanted to get your category page to rank for the keyword, it would be much better to use the entire name.
Many times the standard themes don’t use any heading at all for the post title. You want it wrapped in < h2> tags. Many of the themes just use a class to make the title bigger and bold without using heading tags.
They then use < h2> tags around the sidebar sections - this makes no sense from an SEO standpoint.
November 28th, 2007 at 2:51 pm
Thanks, I was afraid of that.
My permalinks are: /%category%/%postname%/ So I can’t change them now.
But, if I change the Category name, but not the Category slug, will Google be more friendly?
November 28th, 2007 at 3:50 pm
Absolutely. That will give you more links to that category page with the anchor text you want.
November 28th, 2007 at 2:19 pm
One other question. I know you are just adding a note in the footer that you have updated the SEO on these themes.
I have some interest in developing my own theme some day (when I find a minute!!). It would probably be based upon an existing one that I would modify drastically. The $10,000 question is when does the theme stop being the creation of the original author and become your own creation that you can take credit for?
November 28th, 2007 at 2:43 pm
I’m going to leave that one up to you. If you’re using another person’s work, you should probably leave a credit link to them there, especially if you’re going to distribute the theme.
November 28th, 2007 at 3:14 pm
Great post! I’m using the default theme from 2.1 that I have modified. I would REALLY appreciate it if you could PLEASE tell me how the heck to remove the h2 from the widget titles!!
Thanks!
-Caveman
November 28th, 2007 at 3:52 pm
Hi Caveman! Most themes that use widgets have a functions.php. You should be able to edit that file and change the h2 tags to h3s. You will then have to edit your style sheet to make them look the same!
November 28th, 2007 at 4:02 pm
Thank you so much. I was looking in all the wrong places. THANKS so much. I changed them to DIVs instead. I was thinking that would be better for SEO is that wrong? Is h3 better for widget titles?
-Caveman
November 28th, 2007 at 4:46 pm
Not at all! DIVs are perfect.
November 28th, 2007 at 5:44 pm
Court, you’re a rock star.
November 28th, 2007 at 9:08 pm
[…] went a step further by adding another 28 SEO Oprtimized Themes to the inventory of his initial 20. The themes, though not originals by Court, have been dissected […]
November 28th, 2007 at 10:11 pm
I have been using a SEO’d theme that I got from Court for a while now. These things are great. My site has a ways to go but I already rank decent for a few of my keywords. I have had other themes for other sites before and I seem to be getting results faster with this one.
-Dave
November 29th, 2007 at 6:15 am
Nice collection of themes.
November 29th, 2007 at 10:21 am
[…] 48 SEO WordPress Themes And Why You Should Use One | Internet Marketing | Strategy & Services Some nice ready made free WP themes that already have the SEO stuff built in. (tags: wordpress seo) […]
November 29th, 2007 at 10:50 pm
Oh how I wish you had published these before my sites were set up! I am very tempted to make a change.
November 30th, 2007 at 9:48 pm
[…] continues to optimize themes and has reached an impressing number. “48 SEO WordPress Themes And Why You Should Use One” - Yep, that’s right, 48. Now all nicely sorted and […]
December 3rd, 2007 at 2:19 am
The 48 themes listed are awesome. I tested a few and all of them are nicely optimized for SEO. I am looking forward to the next 20. Great job Court!
December 5th, 2007 at 4:26 am
Hi Court, thanks for adding value to my blogging. I have a problem with 301 redirect, is there any scheduled post regarding this?
December 11th, 2007 at 11:46 pm
[…] 48 SEO WordPress Themes And Why You Should Use One | Internet Marketing | Strategy & Services - The time has come to unveil 28 new search engine optimized WordPress themes! I’ve held off on posting the new themes because I needed to … […]
December 13th, 2007 at 8:02 am
Thanks Court for the theme. It helps me in understanding a bit about optimizing wordpress blog. sometime we don’t realise that just a slight change on our blog could make a big difference on the eyes of the spider.
December 13th, 2007 at 9:11 pm
Thanks for this great collection - I included you in my recent article on Free WordPress Themes
Thanks again
December 28th, 2007 at 10:01 am
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[…] best resource I have found for SEO Wordpress Themes is at Courts Internet Marketing School. On the post linked to here, he gives the reasons why he has chosen the themes. Court has gone […]
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July 13th, 2008 at 6:27 am
Very Nice