Is Your Blog, Search Engine Friendly?
Did you know that in order to gain high rankings in Search Engines like Google, your blog or website MUST be optimized.
Since, I’m using WordPress, which in my opinion is one of the best CMS Blogging tool on the planet right now! I’d like to share with you a technique on how you can confirm if the WP theme you just downloaded from say…www.ABCthemes.com is SEO optimized.
First off, with any of your themes, it is HIGHLY RECOMMENDED that you install a plugin called AIOSEOP (All-In-One-SEO Pack.)
Here are the steps:-
From your WP dashboard, on the left pane, select PLUGINS and click “Add New”. You will see a plugins search box like this:-
Next, in the box, type “all-in-one seo” and click Search Plugins.
You will then be taken to the results page where you will Install the first result shown which says All-In-One SEO Pack.
But please bear in mind, by simply installing AIOSEOP plugin, it is not enough to make your WP theme SEO optimized. This is because usually the tags are all messed up, unless the WP theme designer was an SEO expert and knew exactly what he was doing as per required by Google’s ranking standards.
REMEMBER! AIOSEOP cannot fix messed up h1 tags in your theme and for the Search Engines, these tags are vital.
Follow the steps I’ve highlighted below to check if your WP theme is SEO Optimized.
(This technique only works with the Mozilla Firefox browser. So, if you’re still back-dated and using Internet Explorer or worst still Netscape Navigator, please close your browser and launch the Firefox browser.)
(Don’t have Firefox? Download it for FREE here!)
STEP 1: Install the Web Developer Plugin for Firefox. (this only works in Firefox).
Download Web Developer Plugin:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60
STEP 2: Visit the blog site after you have downloaded a theme and activated it.
STEP 3: Click on CSS > Disable Styles > All Styles on the Web Developer Toolbar or simply press Ctrl-Shift-S.
What this does is strip out all the javasript and css styling in your website. Something like what a google bot (robot) will do when it crawls your site.
Now, to know if that theme is SEO optimized, the Title or your main keyword should be at the very top of the webpage after you disabled styling. And as much as possible your main content should go before the sidebar and the footer.
H1 Tags
From what I know, there should only be one h1 tag occuring in any given page. Otherwise, your blog cannot be optimized. At one time, I had a theme that had 8 h1 tags in the home page.
The Blog Title and the recent posts were all tagged with h1. I tried searching my post through google and the first result that came up was from my homepage and did not direct me to where the actual post was, this was pretty weird and messed up till I found out about the h1 tags.
STEP 4: On your keyboard, press Ctrl + U and then Ctrl + F and find how many h1 tags there are in the page you are viewing.
In the index page or homepage, the h1 tag should be your main keyword, while on the post page the post title should be wrapped in h1 tag.
Also please don’t forget about the meta description, and meta keywords tag on your header. These play a major factor in SEO too.
Want to grab the complete SEO steps to optimize any WP theme? I highly recommend if you visited my good friend Nathan’s blog. He has done a marvellous job of posting upto 10 different SEO steps to optimize any WP theme out there.
Here is his blog url:
http://www.nathanrice.net/blog/wordpress-seo-the-ultimate-guide-to-wordpress-theme-search-engine-optimization/
Till next time…
