How WP Themes work with Navigation Structure for SEO and JQuery Headers?

[hfranz]

I am trying to find the best WP Theme for our company. I noticed most of them do not offer a left hand side navigation on the home pages, and usually are on the right side on the inside pages.

I always thought that Home Page links were very important for SEO. Currenly we have a left drop down navigation with all of our product catagories, keyword optimized. The structure follows for all the pages.

Is this not as important to Search Engines anymore? Is it better to have a products link, to all the products and then the inside pages, have just a navigation bar, for that particular catagory?

This seems to be very common on all the templates i am seeing.

I also noticed, and really like the JQueary Tabs. I would use this for displaying, PDFs and Specifications Charts.

Also, some home page images are using a jquery slider with some text, linking to a page.

Is Jquery the new javascript and do search engines see what is in the code?

I also noticed they all have footers that have links and some other information. Is this a SEO must have?

[Hurf]

If it is built into the framework - Genesis from StudioPress for example - it should turn itself off when it detects a dedicated SEO plugin - for other SEO plugins I would deactivate them first to prevent conflicts. Yoast's plugin will manage everything you need including a great sitemap generator - which works well where others fail (in heavily modified wordpress installs such as Appthemes Classipress for example.)

[hfranz]

Awesome Thank You. Do I have to deactivate any other seo plugin prior to installing yoast? I currenly have a blog using Platinum SEO. I will try yoast! And will for the site too.

[Hurf]

Having your products physically displayed under the main products link is not an issue. They will still be seen and indexed by the search engines.

if you are using the permalink settings to tidy your urls - be sure to set the permalink structure up so the URLs display a short - tidy URL - by using /%category%/%postname% or just /%postname% and dont place the product links deep down in subcategories www.domain.com/products/product-type/product-sub-type/product-namexyz/

Don't forget to look at the Yoast Wordpress SEO plugin http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/ - I now consider this essential in every wordress installation (unless I am using Thesis framework - as Thesis will not support it :O(

[hfranz]

Thanks!

Navigation elements are indeed very important. Quite simply make the most important pages accessible from the front page.

I get this, but if the main important pages are accessible under a products tab from the home page, is this still good for SEO. Instead of listing each product page link on the left navigation ? For Ex: If I remove our left navigation and just have links on the top like,

Home | Products | About | Blog | Contact

If the products tab was a drop down menu with all the catagories listed, will that code to the drop down links still be seen by seo, or is the actual button link they see?

[Hurf]

Some quick additional thoughts:

Choose a wordpress theme which works well with the Yoast Wordpress SEO plugin - as this is a very powerful and configurable plugin - generally considered to be the best plugin for SEO in Wordpress. Thesis framework for example is one that does NOT work well with Yoast's plugin.

I would look at the studiopress themes as they work well, offer a good degree of flexibility, they are well coded and the support and forums are excellent! http://www.studiopress.com/themes

Navigation elements are indeed very important. Quite simply make the most important pages accessible from the front page. The vast majority of my best ranking sites are created using wordpress along with Yoast's plugin and a great number use the studiopress themes among others, so this is a great start for any project that you wish to see perform well in the SERPS.

Don't fill the footer with hundreds of spammy/poor quality links - if it looks spammy to you - rest assured it will look spammy to Google too! To clarify, add links that assist the user navigate your site to the footer - links such as Terms & Conditions | Sitemap etc that don't need high visibility on the top of the page - also consider a return to the top of the page link if the site has long content pages.

Be sure to add a human readable sitemap (HTML) not just an XML sitemap for the Search Engines.

JQuery can work well for menus, but do remember that for the search engines to be able to index your website the link structure must be easily accessible without javascript or CSS via semantic HTML.

I might also consider re-creating the contents of any PDFs as web pages in their own right - and have the PDF version available as a download option - if this is feasible - as you gain another opportunity to show relevance within the content of your pages. Search Engines can read PDFs to a degree, but they are not as readable as regular HTML content.

[CodyWheeler]

Lot's of good questions in here. I'll do my best to answer a few.

• Most main level navigation on Wordpress themes is going to be across the top, or on the right side with a category widget. The reason being because this is basically the paradigm for blog content. Content appears on the left to maximize the viewing area to how we read (left to right), and main navigation appears up top to make better use of the limited real estate we have to create the site (for things like CTA graphics and such). You'll be hard pressed to find a theme with left-hand navigation, as most sites are migrating away from this structure nowadays.

• Main page navigation is very important to search engines. A link in the main navigation of a site makes a page stand out to the search engines as being quite important, and also delivers a lot of link juice to the subsequent page. Keep in mind you can only have so many links in your main navigation before your user experience suffers. If something is important on your site and you can link to it from the main navigation (such as your main products page) you should give it a link in the main navigation.

• There is some debate about jQuery. It's really cool for nice navigation schemes, but can get sticky as to whether or not bots can read it. Google is taking steps to be able to, and can read it given you use simple enough coding, but if you can do it with CSS, you'd be smart to do so. You don't want to get stuck hoping Google can read your site.

• The thing with footer links is this - They used to be valuable for SEO because you could have a bunch of links on your homepage that would link throughout the whole site. Now search engines are devaluing them because a lot of sites were abusing them. However, they're still quite useful for a quasi site map. They're used now for more of a user experience thing than an SEO thing.

• Also always always keep in mind that not all designers (in fact very few) are SEO savvy. Just because you see it in a lot of designs doesn't make it right for SEO.