SEO question - does the wordpress theme matter?

darbsllim

darbsllim

New member
Mar 28, 2008
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London, Ontario
Hey I'm just wondering if the theme you use for blogs in a blog network actually matter for SEO purposes?

I know it matters for the look, the click flow & the psychology of the viewer - but does the theme actually do anything for SEO?

Thanks in advance for anyone who can help me =P
 


You want variation in the themes. Don't use the same theme for all the sites, and don't just change a couple colors and think they are gonna be different. You want the html source to be different.
 
No the theme does not matter. And yes you can use the same theme and color for all of the sites. That doesn't matter either.

What matters is the content and meta information - like any site. Don't think of Wordpress as being SEO or non-SEO . Wordpress produces HTML just like every other theme out there. At the end of the day the search engines don't know you used Wordpress or anything else. They know content. Use the same graphics and theme for 100 sites - it doesn't matter. But make sure every page on every site is unique and optimized in terms of:

Titles
Topic
Meta Information
Inbound links
Outbound links

These are the cardinal rules for every page of content on the internet. They apply across content management systems. Once you know and understand these things it doesn't matter if you use wordpress, notepad or frontpage.
 
darbsllim said:
thanks for the responses.

So themes don't control:


Titles
Topic
Meta Information

?
Click to expand...

It does, but it is about the same for all themes. And you are gonna need a seo plugin to customize your titles, descriptions, page titles etc.. And you can control your H2s or H3 tags in the sidebar...
 
patrick24601 said:
No the theme does not matter. And yes you can use the same theme and color for all of the sites. That doesn't matter either.

What matters is the content and meta information - like any site. Don't think of Wordpress as being SEO or non-SEO . Wordpress produces HTML just like every other theme out there. At the end of the day the search engines don't know you used Wordpress or anything else. They know content. Use the same graphics and theme for 100 sites - it doesn't matter. But make sure every page on every site is unique and optimized in terms of:

Titles
Topic
Meta Information
Inbound links
Outbound links

These are the cardinal rules for every page of content on the internet. They apply across content management systems. Once you know and understand these things it doesn't matter if you use wordpress, notepad or frontpage.
Click to expand...

In general I'd agree, a machine is gonna place a lot of weight on things that a human may not necessarily notice in an natural setting. But based on some of the things he was asking about in a previous thread, I think his question may be in the context of how to keep a network of autoblogs indexed. In that sense, the objective would be to give the appearance that 100s of sites are built and maintained by 100s of different owners.
 
"So themes don't control: Titles Topic Meta Information"

No. This is controlled by your content and the SEO plugin you use.

jryan21: Ahhh. Now I understand the question in a different context :)
 
jryan21 said:
In general I'd agree, a machine is gonna place a lot of weight on things that a human may not necessarily notice in an natural setting. But based on some of the things he was asking about in a previous thread, I think his question may be in the context of how to keep a network of autoblogs indexed. In that sense, the objective would be to give the appearance that 100s of sites are built and maintained by 100s of different owners.
Click to expand...

do you think I should use different plugins for different sites? Or just use the same plugins?

I wasn't thinking that using the same plugins for all the sites would cause me to get deindexed because I'm going to be hosting no more than 6 sites on the same c class host.

Anyone have a good list of seo plugins?

I'm considering going with wpdirect, and I think this is their list of plugins:

AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget
Adsense Manager
All-in-One SEO Pack
Category Posts widget
cForms
Ultimate Google Analytics
Google XML Sitemaps
Sale Offer Ads Plug-in
Sale Offer Ads Widget
Wordpress Duplicate Content Cure
Wordpress Video Plug-in
WPD Ad and banner plugin
WP-PostRatings
WP-PostRatings Widget
WP-sticky
WP tags to Technorati
Pretty Link



Then I've heard there's these ones I should get as well to help with monetizing:

OfferTrappers
What Would Seth Godin Do
GoCodes
Stealth Traffic System



I got these lists from 'guru' products, so I'm not sure if these are the best up to date plugins.
 
These are really the only ones I've used consistently:

All-in-One SEO Pack
Google XML Sitemaps

They don't contribute much towards a footprint, since they are used on a shitload of sites; the SEO pack used to inject some html comments (mostly version number, etc), if they still do and you want them out you probably have to dig into the code and do so every time you upgrade, but it's not that big a deal.

XML Sitemaps - if you have 10,000+ pages on a site, you are gonna probably need to dial this down from its default settings or you'll get mysql timeouts and such.
 
You need to have the right theme to have an optimized blog.
So title in h1, it does matter if the sidebar is after or before the actual content (blog posts) etc
 
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