SEO-friendly WordPress Templates
-
Hi,
I usually build WordPress sites and I was thinking about buying one of those ready-made Wordpress templates I found on a site that sells them to the public. FYI, the site at issue is: yootheme.com. I'd like to make sure that building sites using ready-made templates is NOT a bad thing. Could you please confirm?
Thank you.
-
Thank you, Dan!
All the best to you.
- Sal
-
Not bad at all! Unless there is a very similar site in your industry of a competitor and risk being accused of "copying".
-Dan
-
Hi Dan
Thank you for your detailed answer. Since you seem very prepared in SEO and SEO related to WordPress, please answer this quick question:
Let's pretend I want to build a new site and I like the WordPress template that you can find on this site:
Is it bad, as far as SEO is concerned, that I build my site using the same template I find on another site? Of course, the content and all the structure will be different; the only similar thing is the template.
Thank you very much.
-
Its not bad at all, I would just recommend using free themes available only within WordPress. Maybe someone else knows of a trusted source of free themes. And yes, you can use the free plugins just the same.
-Dan
-
How bad is it to use a free Wordpress theme and just get the plugins as needed for free as well?
-
Thanks for the responses John and 'walrus'
The only two sites I trust to buy themes from are;
You're right, pro perks discounts are here - and woothemes are included.
Then be sure you read my post on WordPress, and look under the "Themes" section for the best way to set up themes once installed. I've never seen a perfect one for SEO. They're all a little wonky.
Basically I say;
"DO use themes for design elements;
- Colors
- Fonts,
- Page layout
- Headers
- Footers
- Basic social media button stuff
Do NOT use themes for SEO stuff, such as
- Indexation
- Analytics codes
- Titles and descriptions
- RSS feeds
- Menu structure (ideally this is done with WordPress Custom Menus)
Let the Yost SEO plugin handle this stuff! Shut off / do not use these types of SEO functions within the themes."
Hope this helps!
-Dan
-
Agree with John, and you have a WooThemes 40% discount code in PRO Perks section!!!!
-
Hi there,
Yep you can find some excellent premium themes that are SEO friendly - WooThemes has some great ones. I'd also recommend installing the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast to ensure your titles and descriptions (as well as other elements) are properly optimised.
Hope that helps!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Hostage Taking by My Wordpress Developer
Since 2013 a Wordpress developer has coded my real estate website. Their hourly rate is $24 but the programmers take too long to perform tasks and the service has become prohibitively expensive. Examples of unreasonable time estimates below: | | 1. Change theme settings so posts/pages do not display a date. -> 7 hrs
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
2.Google search results are displaying the breadcrumb on the top of each page rather than the URL. Please correct so this does not display. -> 3 hrs
3. Install SSL certificate to www.metro-manhattan.com domain -> 8 hrs | | The above does not include 5-6 hours for testing. I am considering changing vendors. Potential programmers have asked how the site was developed and to what extent is it is customized. Ends up several plugins were built from scratch. My question is whether a new developer is going to be able to pick up a custom coded site. That without understanding how the site was built, any change will break the site. My concern is that current developer has made themselves indispensable, and created a situation where there is no alternative to using them and they can therefore charge any price they want.Any thoughts? Also below are questions I asked my developer about how the site was built and their answers: | 1. Was everything coded using a child theme?
No, is a custom theme. 2. Did you use any ready made theme or just plugins
We used the theme and and we've used plugins. Third party plugins and plugins builded from scratch 3. Can Wordpress and every one of the plugin be updated?
Wordpress can be updated, core files was never modified. If after an update something start to work wrong is due to some radical wordpress change or similar Can't be updated: FireStorm Professional Real Estate Plugin Created at xxx: Form Submissions Report Miscellaneous Hooks and Filters NYC Check memory usage NYC SEO listings NYC Slider Sitemap Updater 4. Were any of the plugins customized and if so, which ones?
Yes, this plugin "FireStorm Professional Real Estate Plugin" |0 -
Changing categorisation effect on SEO
Hi I work on an ecommerce shop & we've discussed changing some of out categories. We have one named cupboards & lockers, but want to split this out, so we have Cupboards then Lockers so customers can browse through our main navigation like this. For SEO I know initially our rankings will be affected, but long term moving categories up a level will be an improvement & will be more relevant - has anyone does this before and could provide any advice? Becky
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
SEO transfer to new website
My website currently has some strong SEO and i will be re-developing the website on a wordpress platform...which will change many of the existing URL. Will this affect the current pages that are well indexed in Google? Does using Wordpress or changing the URL extension (.html to .php) make a difference? If i want to make a clean transition without effecting our existing SEO...what are some essential steps i need to take? Example. Current page is www.mydomain.com/name.html .... and the new URL would be www.mydomain.com/product/name.php Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Souk0 -
A few important mobile SEO questions
I have a few basic questions about mobile SEO. I'd appreciate if any of you fabulous Mozzers can enlighten me. Our site has a parallel mobile site with the same urls, using an m. domain for mobile and www. for desktop. On mobile pages, we have a rel="canonical" tag pointing to the matching desktop URL and on desktop pages we have a rel="alternate" tag pointing to the matching mobile URL. When someone visits a www. page using a mobile device, we 301 them to the mobile version. Questions: 1. Do I want my mobile pages to be indexed by Google? From Tom's (very helpful) answers here, it seems that I only want Google indexing the full site pages and if the mobile pages are indexed it's actually a duplicate content issue. This is really confusing to me since Google knows that it's not duplicate content based on the canonical tag. But - he makes a good point - what is the value of having the mobile page indexed if the same page on desktop is indexed (I know that Google is indexing both because I see them in search results. When I search on mobile Google serves the mobile page and when I search on desktop Google serves me the desktop page.)? Are these pages competing with each other? Currently, we are doing everything we can do ensure that our mobile pages are crawled (deeply) and indexed, but now I'm not sure what the value of this is? Please share your knowledge. 2. Is a mobile page's ranking affected by social shares of the desktop version of the same page? Currently, when someone uses the share buttons on our mobile site, we share the desktop url (www. - not m.). The reason we do this is that we are afraid that if people are sharing our content with 2 different url's (m.mysite.com/some_post and www.mysite.com/some_post) the share count will not be aggregated for both url's. What I'm wondering is: will this have a negative effect on mobile SEO, since it will seem to Google that our mobile pages have no shares, or is this not a problem, since the desktop pages have a rel="alternate" tag pointing to mobile pages, so Google gives the same ranking to the mobile page as the desktop page (which IS being shared)?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YairSpolter0 -
Domain Forwarding - SEO Impacts?
I have a site that has been active for years - thinkbiglearnsmart.com. Awhile ago I had purchased about 50 domain names that were relevant to my company. I still have those urls and would like to use them to point to different pages on my site - just because they have good key words in the URLs. For example - one is dreamweavertrainingclassesonlinelive.com. Currently they are all redirecting to my homepage. A. is that hurting me? B. I would like to redirect to the more relevant page. ie the page dedicated to Dreamweaver training (http://thinkbiglearnsmart.com/dreamweaver-creative-cloud-training-course/ ) Will this hurt my Dreamweaver keyword for example because there is already a 301 redirect on that page from a very old Dreamweaver link which was something like thinkbiglearnsmart.com/dreamweaver C. On my hosting account where I can select where the URL forwards to - it has an option for "Location forwarding" and "Frame forwarding" - currently they are set to Frame forwarding - which one is best? Any help is much appreciated!!! Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | webbmason0 -
SEO Provider
At the risk of opening the flood gates, I'm posting this in hopes of finding a SEO provider on this site. I'm currently a member, and have learned a lot through this site, but I'm still having issues ranking higher. Because of this, I have come to the conclusion that I need a dedicated SEO company/professional who can help our company reach the next level. I'm open to suggestions of companies that you have used, or please feel free to throw your hat into the ring. Thanks in advance! AW
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheCTC0 -
Changing Servers + Effect on SEO
Hi, I am currently with a very slow server. Our website takes quite a while to load, FTP is very slow and content changes with Wordpress are slow because even the database connection takes a lot of time. However, my website ranks very well. Traffic has doubled in the last year. Our domain has been registered with this company for over 10 years. I am wondering if changing to a different hosting provider would have an effect on my rankings due to the change in IP.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MangoMan160 -
Optimizing the HomePage of a WordPress blog
Dearest SEOmozzers, I am creating WordPress blogs and I would like to know from a WordPress expert how to better optimize the homepage of a site. In particular, I'd like to know how to create an SEO-friendly homepage that I want to optimize for certain keywords. Do you think that it is better to show on the homepage the posts that I write, which change constantly, or a static, well-optimized text that will include the keywords I want to rank for? I have been naively using the changing posts, but after an analysis of the competitors I have noticed that most of them use a static text and show only the most recent post at the bottom of the page. I'd really appreciate it if you could let me know the best practice to adopt to optimize the site. Thank you. Sal
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | salvyy0