SEO

How to SEO a Wordpress Template

July 22, 2008 By: Justin | 12 Comments

I recently offered to SEO Wordpress themes for for my visitors. This lead to some comments about how to SEO a Wordpress template and what I would be doing. I thought I’d walk you through how I personally optimize my Wordpress templates for search engines. I’m going to use my theme as an example. It isn’t “perfect”, but it has some solid SEO strengths. When doing Search Engine Optimization, it is important to structure your code with intent. A web designer’s concern is how the template appears, but an SEO’s job requires them to worry about how Google reads the code. A solid template will help you rank higher with Wordpress.

I took a screenshot of my source code. It is below. Warning, its huge. I made it smaller, but I thought this was a solid way to explain exactly what I am doing. I suggest opening the image in another tab (if you do not have Firefox, get it now). I did this so I could highlight sections, you can also just view my source.

(it is big)

Template Structure

I generally structure my templates like this.

  • HTML Header
  • H1
  • Content
  • H2’s
  • Sidebar
  • H3’s
  • Footer
  • Anchored link to home page

You’ll see the basic layout with my template. Which I’ll walk through in just a moment

Clean Code

I’m a big fan of standards design and working to validate my code. I’m not obsessive over it, but I make effort to reduce the number of errors in my code. I program with divs and CSS, not tables. This isn’t a must for SEO, because Matt Cutts has said they don’t penalize you for bad code. But the important thing is making your site easy to crawl. Tables give search engines a hard time. You have to remember it is a computer trying to figure out your site. Computers have limited intelligence, so make it easier for them. This won’t make you rank higher, but it will help Google crawl and index all of your information (which indirectly can help your rankings).

So when I get a new template, I always take some time to clean up the code. Remove any errors or bad coding practices.

Secondly, many free templates hide stuff all over the place. This site runs on a free template, but the original was HORRIBLE. It had links and ADSENSE hidden everywhere. Yes, the fool hard coded his Adsense into the template, so I had to go file by file and find it. I already go through and scan every line of text to make sure I know exactly what I’m about to put up and link with my network.

Guided Tour Of My Wordpress Template

Template Header

So let’s start with the header, its not too complicated, there are only a few things to point out. I’ve highlighted my whole header in blue.

First, you want your template to have a strong title. I use All in One SEO to manage my titles. I make sure the title is set up so it can use All in One SEO. You can see my title, which is the second one I highlighted in red.

I also added Geotags. Now this is a little nontraditional, but there are meta tags designed to tell your site’s geographical location. I am geotargeting this site, so I wanted to emphasis my geographical location. I do not know how much trust Google places on these since their isn’t much documentation on it. The only change I saw was a reduction in my local business listings, but it doesn’t seem to hurt my rankings at all. I rank #2 for my keyword, so it seems to have helped some.

The last thing you’ll see in my header is that I cleaned up the code from Brian’s Threaded Comments. I made a post about that recently. I like reducing the space between the start of the document and the content. Also this speeds up your loading time by moving the code to external files.

H1 Tag

I put the H1 at the very top of the page. You can see it highlighted in red right after the blue section of the header. Most people who have done SEO for a while know Google applies extra weight to information in the H1 tag. Well Google also gives weight to words near the top of the document. When Google arrives at my site, the first thing they read in my body is an H1 tagged keyword. This improves the prominence of that keyword.

I like to follow this structure: tell them what you’re going to tell them, then tell them, and then remind them of what you told them.

The H1 tag is the “tell them what you’re going to tell them”. After reading my title, meta, and h1, Google already knows the content of my page. I then set off to reinforce the keyword.

Navigation

I’m breaking my advice here a little. Honestly, my navigation elements should come after my content. (I do with my sidebar) But I figured this little list was small enough to get away with. Its not really enough to push my content far down the page.

I suggest everyone go in and manually code their navigation menu. You should put no follows on these. There is debate and discussion that Google gives most weight for the first time it sees a link on your page and that the first link’s anchor text is counted the most. And some think 2nd and 3rd links are not counted. You do not want to set internal authority for the word “home” on your index page. Nofollow all the navigational elements that are useless.

Optimized Content

Nothing else to really say here, but go read my post on writing for search engines. I get lazy some times and don’t do it right all the time, but you’ll spot on my site when I’m focusing a post on purpose.

Take a look at this post. See the keywords in the intro paragraph? See how I worked my keywords into bolds and header tags? I can honestly write about what ever I want here in the middle. I will sandwich my content with my keywords, then include them in the title and H1. That’s enough to be optimized on site. After that, its just a matter of links.

H2 Tags

I use H2 tags for my post titles. These are given extra weight by Goolge. This way my homepage is give extra weight for these post titles. SEO’s like Griz set up their blog for 1 post per page, which is a great approach for Adsense. He makes sure every page is only optimized for 1 keyword. I personally don’t do this, because I like having a my recent stuff on the home page. It doesn’t really hurt, but I see it as a trade off of usability. You’ll see the H2 tags highlighted in green in the image of my template.

Sidebar

This is an important part of your templates design. PUT YOUR REPETATIVE NAVIAGATION SIDEBAR AFTER YOUR CONTENT.

Again.

PUT YOUR SIDEBAR AFTER YOUR CONTENT!

If you put it first, then the first 1/3 of every single page of your site looks exactly the same to Google. Improve your keyword prominence by pushing your content to the top and the useless stuff to the bottom.

Again.

Put your sidebar after your content.

You’ll see a highlight where my sidebar starts.

H3

Many themes use H2 tags in their sidebar to define the headers for the different sections. This dilutes the authority these tags carry by using theme on repetitive and useless keywords. So for the site bar, you should change these to H3 or just a div.

You’ll notice I do use H2 tags twice in my sidebar, which seems against my advice, but this was intentional. I include the phrase “SEO Zombie” in each one. I wanted to add extra weight to the word SEO, so this is an easy way for me to have SEO in H2 tags on ever page.

You can see my H3 tags highlighted in yellow.

Template Footer

Lastly, you need a strong footer. There are a couple things I did in my footer to help my SEO. First, I anchor one of my keyword back to my home page. This helps me push internal authority to my home page for that keyword. The second thing I do is to use my keywords in my footer. These don’t carry much weight, but it allows me to have my keyword used on every single page. Google can detect your footer, but every little bit can help. The last thing I do is include my city and state in the footer of every page. I am geotargeting targeting this site, so I want Google to see a reference to the city and state on every page.

I also nofollow the useless site wide links, because I don’t want to waste internal juice on them.

Conclusion

This is a long post to explain something that isn’t too difficult, but some people still don’t take the time to optimize their theme. With my theme, the keywords are the first and last thing you see. I put the important stuff first and the useless stuff last. I use headings and bold effectively. And I keep the code clean, so Google doesn’t have any problems. These seem minor, but strong on site SEO can move up an established site up by pages.

So I hope this helps you optimize your Wordpress template for search engines. For those who are comfortable with HTML / CSS, this shouldn’t be hard. If you have no experience with HTML and want some help optimizing your free wordpress theme, then let me know and I’ll SEO it for you.

Also, be sure to check my posts about SEO web design and writing for SEO.

Filed Under SEO Wordpress Themes

Will SEO Your Theme

July 21, 2008 By: Justin | 11 Comments

I’m working on making my own collection of Wordpress themes that have be optimized for search engines. I started doing this for use on my personal sites (a lot like I did with BANS), but would be more than happy to share some love while I’m at it. Since I’m doing this anyways, there is not reason others can’t benefit from it.

If you have a particular Wordpress theme you would like optimized, drop a comment and I’ll add to my list. If you use a free theme that can be shared on your site and want it optimized, let me know which you use and leave me a link where I can find it.

I have a few done now and can post up your requests as I finish them. The time frame on this will vary since I get busy some times. I’m moving in 3 weeks, so I have a lot of other things in the air, but I will work on them one at a time.

Filed Under Wordpress

Sneaky (and Simple) Blog Farm

July 20, 2008 By: Justin | Leave a Comment

Every now and then I like throwing in a “sneaky” SEO post. So lets talk about blog farms. I’m not going to go in depth with this one, because it could get people in trouble. This is blackhat (or at least very gray). I know some people who are interested in stuff like this, so I thought I’d point people in a direction by sharing an idea I have. Warning: I haven’t tried this method. It isn’t full developed. It will require more than what I cover here. Google will slap you to death for doing this, if caught.

Theoretically this should work. I’d do it a little different than I describe here, but I this will show you the thought process involved.

Now consider you want to start a blog farm to provide you with low quality links. If you were to do link laundering on a large scale, you might want to lunch 50 to 100 blogs or maybe a few 1,000. So how can one generate all the content for this? Well many people use content generators and rewriters and markov engines. They scrap content from SERPS, wikipedia, and blog RSS feeds. They mash this content together and automate blogs. But, what if you’re just doing 20 sites. What if you want to pass a visual inspection? What if you want real content? Well, here is an idea I’ve been putting together for a while.

WP-O-Matic

Let me introduce you to WP-O-Matic, which is an autoblogging plugin for Wordpress. It basically checks a series of RSS feeds periodically, grabs their content, and posts it to your blog. A very simple way of automating blogging.

Its biggest flaws are that it leaves links intact and does not have an advanced rewriter. It is not the best option for those wanting to mass produce content sites. A little creativity and this plugin can go a long long way. The key to this is the rewrite function involved. The rewrite is very basic, but it can do 3 things: change some text to different text, change one link to another, change text and link at same time. This is how we’re going to do this, so let me explain.

Your Farm Blogs

One great way to run a blog farm is set up different personas for each site. One is a young girl in middle school, the other is a male school teacher, one is a football player in college, and one is a rich house wife. Each blog is a personal blog for each of these people where they talk about their day. They aren’t monetized. These types of sites appear 100% legit and would pass a visual inspection. This is what we’re going to do, we’re going to automate an entire series of blogs and each will have a different personality.

Personalities

You’ll need to sit down and come up with a small story for each person. Little things like: what kind of car, where are they from, where they work, favorite food, favorite movie, etc. Make a list of these types of things for each person. Now, we’re going to set up a blog for each of them.

Blog Set Up

There are going to be two types of blogs. The end blogs and the source blogs. The end blogs will be the ones devoted to each of these personalities. You’ll install each of these with WP-O-Matic. Now we’ll set up a source blog (or blogs). Tell each of the end blogs to pull the feed from the source blog (or blogs).

And this is what you’ll do. Write a post like this (on the source blog).

[time1] I went with [girlfriend-boyfriend] to [favorite-restaurant] and I ate [favorite-food]. It was a lot of fun, because I haven’t since them [day3]. I then went to see a movie in [part-of-town-3] and we watched the new Batman movie.

Catching on yet? For those who haven’t figured out what I’m doing: We’re writing a generalized post that will be pulled by each of the end blogs. Each end blog is set up to do a word replace based off that persona. You can easily replace all major nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and verbs …. enough to pass duplicate content? You now have 30 blogs that automatically generate posts based off this template by replacing the tags with words you set up.

Real content. Real written blog posts. No mashed up scrapped content =P

Combat Duplicate Content

Now duplicate content is always a concern. There are a few things we can do to improve this.

The first is to set up multiple source blogs. And then mix up what sources each end blog pulls from. The result is that the end blogs won’t have ALL the same posts. If you have 3 source blogs, than 1/3 of your end blogs will have posts the other 2/3 don’t

I suggest installing a related post plugin and using snippets of text. This will help pull in different text blurbs on each post. This will increase the differences between the different blog posts.

Use comments for unique content. Consider being a dofollow blog to increase the number of comments you get. Or considering posting some comments of your own.

Consider going in to some of them and writing a full unique post or editing in some unique content into the automated posts. Do things like change the title and stuff.

Use different categories and url structures. Definatly change the URL structures and vary those when you set it up. Use different themes.

Add some unique content to each blog. Add an about page and other pages that will provide unique content for that blog.

Conclusion

Now, this isn’t a full how to, because I haven’t put this into practice. I’ve played around with it a little, so I thought I’d share the idea. This is dark gray / black hat SEO. It can and will get you in trouble. If you are an SEO newbie, learn more before you try stuff like this. I won’t provide complete support on doing this and I’m not trying to tell you to do this. I just know some people are interested in this, so here is one method I’ve been thinking about. Now you have you on little blog farm that can pass a visual inspection.

Filed Under Sneaky, Wordpress

« go back — keep looking »