Your WordPress Theme might be Killing your SEO

After repeatedly fixing up themes for SEO reasons, it gets a bit depressing that theme makers are not switched on about the basics.

A common occurance is when the title of the site and the description of the site is formatted with H1 and H2 tags, these tags are important for search engine optimisation purposes.

Repeating the same text in the H1 tag on every page does not allow you to focus each page on it\’s specific function.

Here is an example of a header.php file that will generally have the top part of your site (header image, menu etc)

<div id=\”header\”>
<div id=\”blog-logo\”>
<h1 id=\”blog-title\”> <a href=\”<?php bloginfo(\’url\’); ?>\”> <? bloginfo(\’name\’); ?></a></h1>
<h2 id=\”blog-description\”> <? bloginfo(\’description\’); ?> </h2>
</div>

As you can see the Blog Title is using the H1 tag and the Blog Decription using the H2.

When you get to the content (especially Pages), you find that the title of the post or page content is formatted using a less powerful Header tag.

The title of your content is an important piece of real estate that you cannot let slip by.

A second issue is that the Title that you enter into WordPress when you are creating your content. It is often used as the menu item for that page. Because of this people create poor titles as they create them as a menu label rather than a keyword rich title.

To get around these problems, I do the following:

Remove any Header Tag Formatting

Remove H1 and H2 tags from the header of the site (see above) and reformat with other styles if the blog title and blog description are necessary.

Remove the Post Title

Remove the post title from the content code (either page.php or single.php)

Example

<?php if (have_posts()) : ?>

<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?> <div id=\”post-<?php the_ID(); ?>\”  <?php if(function_exists(\’post_class\’)) : post_class(); else : echo \’class=\”post\”\’; endif; ?>>

<h3><?php the_title(); ?> </h3> <- remove this line

<?php the_content(); ?> <- this is the content of your post or page

Lastly, write Good SEO titles as H1 tags in the actual body of the post or page.

Example

\"\"It is important to check your theme to see if it has been managed in such a way that you can get the best out of your SEO. Some themes say they are SEO friendly but it is worth checking and making some simple changes if needed.