Best Wordpress Themes or Theme Creators for Best SEO Results
-
Hi, I just recently joined SEOMOZ and am excited to be apart of the community. I am launching a blog to educate mu readers on a variety of topics. Is there any specific themes or theme creators that do a great job at structuring their themes from a technical perspective for the best SEO results? Thanks!
-
Always glad to be useful to the community.
Regards.
Sergio
-
Sergio mentioned Child Themes. Personally I would recommend the use of frameworks that support child themes, easier to upgrade, easier to make changes. In the long run just easier.
Also Sergio thanks for the PageNavi suggestion.
-
Thesis, Genesis, ect. Doesn't matter you can install Yoast like Andy said.
-
I agree with William. You must choose your theme based on your goals. Once you have your prefered theme, you have a huge list of plugins out there that can help you in your SEO tasks, but let me give you my favorites:
-WordPress SEO by Yoast (Andy and William are correct, it's the best): it lets you do a great on-page optimization, e.g. titles, meta descriptions, rel canonical, robots, etc.
-XML-Sitemaps: although Yoast plugin gives you the possibility of auto-generating a sitemap of your website, lately presented some operational problems. So, the best option is XML-Sitemap, where you can generate and send to search engines both sitemaps and compressed sitemaps.
-W3 Total Cache: SEO is not just about on-page optimization and linkbuilding, but website performance too. You need to pay attention to how your site appears to users: load speed, browser cache, javascript and css minifying, etc. This plugin lets you control all these variables (Warning: be careful, you must know what you do).
-PageNavi: this fantastic plugin helps you with the pagination of your website, one task that sometimes can harm your SEO efforts.
Apart from these plugins, there are themes that come pre-configured to support the optimization of your website. You need to use these frameworks and work with child themes:
-Thematic: made by Automattic, the WordPress Team.
-Genesis: by StudioPress.
-Canvas: by Woothemes; is not a framework itself, but comes with a bunch of SEO features; recently announced that the SEO features would be replaced by Yoast plugin.
Hope to be helpful.
Sergio.
-
The theme would really depend on the goals of your website.
I'm a big fan of U-Design by Andon. Andy is 100% correct. The Yoast SEO plugin is an automatic for all of my wordpress sites.
-
Dont know about theme but you NEED the Yoast SEO plugin for wordpress - it really is awesome.
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
-
Do Wordpress sites outrank SquareSpace?
I was a big fan of Wordpress. I used it for 10 years. However, because I run a very small business, the constant upkeep needed on WP in the end started to frustrate me in the end, so I moved to SquareSpace. However, I am beginning to question my decision, as one of my sites is struggling really badly, and I mean badly. The other sites are okay. So I started asking around, and most people are saying there shouldn't be a difference. A few people have said their Wordpress sites always outranks their SquareSpace sites. Then I read what Rand Fishkin said in the below Twitter thread, now I am even more confused. I am very reluctant to move to Wordpress, its just so much hassle. But at the same time, if a site doesn't get much traffic then it's useless. https://twitter.com/drew_pickard/status/991659074134556673 https://twitter.com/randfish/status/991974456477278209 Please let me know your thoughts and experience.
Web Design | | RyanUK0 -
Alt tag for SEO
What’s are best rules around alt tag images for tagging? is this still relevant for SEO purposes
Web Design | | aplnzoctober180 -
Doing SEO for single page applications / Prerender.io
My dev and I are migrating an existing multi page application to a single page application with prerender.io. Does anybody have any experience with doing SEO for single page applications? Any other consequences we should take into account? Anything important to expect. Any insights would be 10/10 appreciated.
Web Design | | Edward_Sturm0 -
Multiple Similar Product Variations - Page layout, Title and SEO best practice??
Im doing some research into SEO for our new web design. I sell designer eyewear prescription and sunglasses. Lets take a Ray Ban Wayfarer sunglass it comes in 30 colours and 3 sizes for each model. Up till now i was of the impression that for best practice SEO i would need to have each individual variation as its own page, this would also help with things like google shopping too. So for example heres 1 colour product in 3 sizes of 30 colour variations for this particular model. Ray Ban Wayfarer RB2140
Web Design | | Craigboi1987
Colour: Black 901
Sizes: 47, 50, 54 Currently my urls looks like this with a new page and the size changing on the end for each variation. Ray Ban Wayfarer RB2140 - Black 901 - 47 URL: www.mywebsite.com/ray-ban-wayfarer-rb2140.html?colour=Black+901&size=47 Ray Ban Wayfarer RB2140 - Black 901 - 50 URL: www.mywebsite.com/ray-ban-wayfarer-rb2140.html?colour=Black+901&size=50 Ray Ban Wayfarer RB2140 - Black 901 - 54 URL: www.mywebsite.com/ray-ban-wayfarer-rb2140.html?colour=Black+901&size=54 This is very time consuming and I'm not sure if its adding any benefit to my SEO in fact scared its actually a) slowing my site down (content heavy)
b) looking like duplicate content I am thinking about moving towards a page more like this were it would be just be a model with variations. (not effecting the title/getting a new page per variation) http://demoleotheme.com/vigoss/index.php/atomic-endurance-running-tee-crew-neck.html I am not sure of the pros and cons of doing it this way over the way I'm doing it currently all i know is my site is ranking horribly. Lastly I'm currently running a magento V1.9 store which is renowned for duplicate content slow site speeds etc so have been told moving to woo commerce would benefit me for both site performance and seo but I'm skeptical as currently with this structure of a each SKU being a new page il be up to 8000+ products and multiple product variations that it can handle my needs, anyone with any experience on woo commerce platform? (this might be a operate question apologise) This is absolutely frying my brain so any advice appreciated. Im prepared to put every dying second into just need some solid advice in which direction to go!0 -
Best SSL Certificate to Use
I am setting up an ecommerce website that will sell batteries and like most e-commerce sites we will be taking credit cards. I was exploring the different SSL certificates and providers and I was shocked at the difference in pricing. Anywhere from free to over $1000! What is really necessary and what is nice to have? Any suggestions on SSL providers? Thanks
Web Design | | Atlanta-SMO0 -
Google result showing old Meta Title / Description even though page view source shows new info.
Hey guys! I'm struggling with why Google is ignoring my Meta Title / Description. I made a pretty drastic change to both about a week ago and on the results it hasn't changed. I'm on first page with several keywords and I think this weird caching is hurting me on where I'm at on the page. Thoughts / Ideas?
Web Design | | curtis_williams0 -
Self hosted or YouTube Hosted Videos for SEO?
I am trying to plug holes in my site and the one thing that is lacking is unique videos. I was wondering what is the best way to go about videos for seo purposes? Should I just post onto a youtube channel and then embed into my site or should I look to just place videos on my site with software or should I use any of the other venders out there like Vimeo? Not sure which is the best route. Any tips?
Web Design | | bronxpad0 -
To many scripts in my homepage. This is a problem in SEO?
I adding a lot of new features to my website: JS animated, menus, google translate, alexa counter, google analytics, salesforce, and so on. My website is full of scripts and im worry about the SEO. Is that an issue?
Web Design | | Naghirniac0