If you have developed your website with WordPress, you should know that not all templates are beneficial for your SEO. In fact, choosing the wrong theme can make it a bit difficult for spiders to access and make it difficult for Google to manage your website and get it into search engines.
Therefore, appearance is not the only important thing. You must take into account certain things that will help your positioning strategy not to be affected by a bad template.
It doesn’t matter if you choose a premium template or a free one. What is really important is that the template has a series of characteristics such as speed, versatility, being well outlined, following HTML markup, and others. Of course, we warn you that for these particularities you usually have to pay.
Here we leave you 5 tips so that when you do a search to install a new WordPress theme, you choose the best one for your SEO:
1. Make sure it’s cross-platform
One of the most important features in the best WordPress template for SEO is that it must be responsive, that is, suitable for all types of platforms. This means that it must adapt to tablets, mobile phones, mini laptops, computers and all kinds of screens.
The most important thing is that your content is versatile and its format adapts to the type of screen without sacrificing manageability. Normally the current WordPress themes are naturally responsive, so you should not worry.
This factor is important. For starters, a responsive design enhances the user experience. This causes dwell time to increase and bounce rates to drop. In addition, search engines are already in charge of giving affection to those pages that seek to be viewed from any device.
2. Check that it follows the HTML markup
A WordPress template cannot be SEOfriendly if it does not have a very clear markup. That is, it has headers, body and footers among its components. In addition, you must have basic subdivision structures that help browsers find keywords within your site. You can see this markup clearly in the GeneratePress theme you can contact me as Freelance SEO consultant in Dubai to install it for you.
To be more specific, the topic must have well defined H1, H2, H3, H4. Likewise, you must correctly mark the italics, italics and underlining. They are elements that not only improve the user experience, but are valued by search engines when deciding whether or not they have valuable content.
Likewise, we recommend that you choose a template that allows you to modify the elements without having to access the theme. This is more common in paid themes than in free ones. It is very functional to optimize your footer and header for SEO as well.
3. Must load fast
If you choose a very beautiful theme but it loads extremely slowly, this will subtract points in Google’s algorithm to average your positioning. The most convenient thing is that you choose a simple theme, that loads quickly and that offers the user a better experience, in short, that it is well optimized.
The speed of a web page can vary with respect to the number of CSS and JSS requests that the template makes to the server and the total weight that they all have together. That’s why SEOfriendly themes are optimized to make requests and file uploads with fewer lines of code. These in turn are much less heavy
To consider that it offers a better user experience, it is appropriate that the page loads between 1 and 3 seconds. You can measure this using an online speedometer. This tool will not only tell you the template load times, but it will tell you what you need to optimize to reduce it.
4. Make it customizable
Without a doubt, this is one of the most important elements in SEO friendly website design. This is because Google has never looked favorably on sites that are a complete rip off of another. We are not referring to the content, that too, but to the aesthetics.
Look for a template that lets you experiment with what looks good and what doesn’t and allows you to change the look so that it doesn’t look exactly like everyone else who has that same template. In addition, it should allow you to modify the construction, change the site titles, change the sidebar and be compatible with your Page Builder.
When a website is displayed exactly as the template has left it, it is not reliable. In this sense, it will not be very useful for the search engine to direct the potential client to this site, if they are not going to stay because it does not look professional.
While incorporating SEO elements into your design, make sure they maintain good aesthetics and don’t plagiarize other designs with the same template. Originality is always an additional point in SEO.
5. Complement with Plugins for SEO
Some templates are quite restrictive regarding the openness of their source code. Therefore, they do not usually accept that you include too many plugins that change their style, form or operation.
This is fatal for a website, since many of these plugins complement the SEO operation of the website. Therefore, we recommend you to test the template with these and check how they work. Some go well with any template, while others will start to create mismatch errors.
The most important thing is that your website can be complete with all the elements that you would like to find on it.