Lately, I have been browsing around for a new fresh theme for Chew The Web, I have encountered several creators of premium WordPress Themes, that claims that their themes are SEO friendly. Which sounds reasonable, since they actually charge, a fee for their themes and you shouldn’t ask for less either, especially since WordPress is pretty SEO friendly straight out of the box.
Now, I understand that SEO has a broad spectrum and that it means different things, depending on who you ask. However, If nothing else, you should at least require that a premium theme manage to keep the duplicate content issue, to a minimum.
The duplicate content issue, means that the same content appears at several different URL’s. This might cause your site to be devalued or even penalized, in the search engines. Google is pretty good to spot this and usually, when Google finds duplicate content, they choose the version that they think, represent the content best. This could however, be at a location that you doesn’t want to be ranked high in, like the printer-friendly version of your article, instead of the one with your ads or affiliate links. Not quite what you wanted, right?!
OK, how can you determine if you and the designer have the same references, when it comes to SEO? If the designer offers a live demo of the theme, examine it carefully, and click around to see how the content is presented. One thing that would tell if the designer knows something about SEO, is to click on the different archives, tags and categories links.
Now, you wouldn’t want the posts to be shown in full here, preferable only the title with a link to the single post page, should be visible. The next best thing is just to show a short snippet, also called an excerpt, of your posts.
Surprisingly, some of the premium theme designers, seems to have missed the duplicated content issue and doesn’t have a clue of what I’m talking about, when I contact them about it. Some don’t even reply at all, which is a good sign that you might want to look for another designer.
Now, if you already have bought a theme or have a free one, which displays your posts in full on your archives, tags and categories pages, you should know that this is easy to fix. Here is how it’s done:
First, click on the Appearance title in the left sidebar in your Dashboard and then on the Editor link, see image below.
Now you will see a text editor and your theme files to the right, see image below.
Click on the Archives (archive.php) link. This will bring up the file that is responsible for how your archives, tags and categories pages are displayed. Now look for the following line,
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
This is the start of the ‘loop’ which will fetch all relevant posts, from your WordPress database. Somewhere beneath that line, you’ll find,
<?php the_content(‘Read more…’); ?>
This is the line of code that tells WordPress to display the full post, which isn’t something we want on this type of page. Your code could look a bit different from the one showed above, however the tag the_content will surely be there.
Now, edit your code and replace the tag the_content with the tag the_excerpt
Your code should now look similar to the one below,
<?php the_excerpt(); ?>
Save your file. Done!
By using the tag the_excerpt(), you have told WordPress to just show a short summary of your post, which is just what we want. Just a note, in some themes you must also edit the files tag.php and category.php in the same way as above.
If you would like to read more about how WordPress works and the tags that is available visit, http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags, for a full list and detailed explanation of what they can do for your blog.
Back to topic now, if you hire a WordPress designer or buys a premium theme, you shouldn’t be forced to mixture with the code, the designer should have done that for you, period! Luckily, you now know how to see if a designer know anything about SEO, before you decide to approach him or her, to create your premium theme.
Also, I will post some sites that provides real SEO friendly premium themes, in a couple of days.
