Search Engine Optimization Factors

What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is all about making the valuable content of your blog front and center. Most blogs contain a lot of information, and it can be very difficult for a search engine to “figure out” what an individual post is about. If the search engine doesn’t know what a post is about, it’s not going to be able to send interested visitors to that post.

SEO helps the search engines analyze a post more logically and learn what the point is. This mostly happens by improving the code that runs your blog and using the code that search engines understand. When we evaluate themes on WordPress Theme Review, those are the kinds of things we’re looking for.

The great thing is, SEO can help you no matter how long you’ve had a blog. If you’re just starting out, SEO can get you started on the right foot; all of the content you create in the future will benefit from the changes we make early on. If you’ve had a blog for a while but would like to get more visitors, SEO will magnify the impact of your existing posts and help your future posts, too.

What do we look for in a theme?

This is guaranteed to be the first question from all the WordPress theme developers who visit. While we’re constantly refining our system (and some of these points are necessarily subjective, since most SEO experts won’t agree on a single approach), the basic things we look for are:

• Thoughtful title tags that emphasize individual posts and clearly communicate to the search engines the central idea.
  • Are the post titles inside of <h1> or <h2> tags?
  • On an individual post, does the post title appear at the front of the title bar?
• Proper use of heading tags (<h1>, etc.). There are specific places they should be used (think: meaningful headings within posts) and other places where their value is often wasted (for instance, sidebar titles like “Categories”).
  • Are the sidebar headings in <h1>, <h2>, or <h3> tags? They shouldn’t be.
  • Are the sidebar headings in <hx> tags? They shouldn’t be. (But partial credit is given if they’re in <h3> or lower.)
  • Does the blog description appear in an <hx> tag?
• Semantic, valid code and logical code order that promote accurate assessment of page content by search engines.
  • Does content come before sidebars in the code, regardless of their on-screen position?
  • Does the SEO Tools SEO Analyzer judge it semantic and not obsolete?
• General code quality and standards adherence. While themes don’t have to validate to do well in the search engines, it’s usually a good indicator of the coder’s attention to detail and can predict with reasonable accuracy the overall quality of the theme.
  • Does it validate?
  • Is there more than one <h1> tag in code of the page? There shouldn’t be.

If you’ve created a theme and want to know what we think of your SEO, feel free to suggest we review it. If you disagree with our assessment or want more insight, get in touch and we’ll do our best to help.