One of the great things about wordpress is that there are many free and premium themes available for download. Many of the authors of these themes claim that their theme is SEO optimized or SEO friendly, but in my experiecne the reality is that the vast majority of themes are not SEO optimized as claimed by their authors.
I use a simple test when checking claims that a theme has been optimized. I call it the “Theme Tag Test!” Assuming that there is an online example of the theme in question you can conduct this quick and easy SEO test as follows:
- using your browser display a single post of the theme
- then go to the view menu of your browser and choose view->page source (Firefox), or view->source(IE)
- this should result in a new page that displays the actual html and php code for the post you are viewing
- you don’t need to read all of this html and php code
- just find the first pair of <h1> and </h1> tags
- if the theme has been SEO’d as promised these tags should contain the page name
- so if the name of the post is “My great SEO theme” then that is what should be between the tags.
- if the tags contain anything else then as as far as I am concerned the theme is not SEO’d correctly
What tends to happen is that most themes put the blog name in the <h1> tags for every page and post on the blog. This is fine for the home page of the blog but is a terrible waste of valuable <h1> tags if used on every page. The name of your post should be in the h1 tags as it tells the reader what the post is about, ie its the main subject of the post and thats what you want the search engines to know.
Try the Theme tag test on the theme you are currently using. My guess is that the majority of themes will fail this simple SEO test. And let me know if it works fo fails for your theme. It’s always great to get feedback.
If you like this post Subcribe to my RSS feed to receive new posts