How To Choose a Search Engine Friendly WordPress Theme

So you are ready to get started with WordPress? You have planned your website and ready to set it up and start getting traffic to it. I am often surprised by the large number of folks who pay more attention to the look and feel than the small details about their themes. You can have a theme that comes with a whole lot of bells and whistles. That doesn’t necessarily mean that you are going to get free traffic by using it. I don’t know about you, but if I am starting a business on the back of my WordPress site, I prefer to have a WordPress theme that is SEO friendly and can help me get free leads. You’ll have to do some optimizations, of course. No theme is perfect in that regard. However, it’s always better not to have to start from scratch.

So what is a SEO friendly theme? I have often seen lists of SEO themes on other websites that contain themes that are not exactly SEO friendly. You can’t just look at a theme and say, “oh that seems to be optimized for the organic search.” It’s just not the way it works. You need to pay attention to details and go through the code to figure out whether the theme you are planning to buy is search engine friendly. Here are a few things you need to look for in a search engine friendly WordPress theme:

• Clean Code: you want a theme that comes with a clean code. No messy, loopy code. It would be a great plus if the code is W3C valid.
• Headers: a theme that makes good use of header tags can help you gain a lot of free traffic. Not a lot of theme developers take advantage of header tags, so make sure you look for themes that do.
• Images: how your theme handles images is important. Some sophisticated theme automatically provide alt tags for your images in case your forget them. Of course, you want to make sure you stick with the best practices here.
• CSS/Javascript: make sure you choose a theme that comes with external Javascript code its pages. The same can be said about CSS. No need to have all these in one file.
• Load: you don’t want to get a theme that is to heavy for slow connections to handle. Make sure you go for a lightweight theme that works for most folks.
• Cross-browser compatibility: wouldn’t it be nice if your theme worked great with Chrome, Firefox, and IE?
• Link structure: while you will have a lot to say about how your internal links are structured, you still want to make sure your theme doesn’t take away from your efforts to increase your PR and search engine rankings.
• Content: where your content shows up in your code is somewhat important too. Make sure you choose a theme that puts your best content first in the eyes of search engine bots.

As webmasters become more aware of the importance of owning a search engine friendly theme, theme developers are putting more focus on building templates that give their customers to best chance to get free traffic from the SERPs. No theme is perfect but themes such as Thesis are awfully close to perfection in this area. You’ll still have to do some optimizations yourself, but at least you don’t have to start from scratch.