SEO-friendly WordPress Templates
-
Hi,
I usually build WordPress sites and I was thinking about buying one of those ready-made Wordpress templates I found on a site that sells them to the public. FYI, the site at issue is: yootheme.com. I'd like to make sure that building sites using ready-made templates is NOT a bad thing. Could you please confirm?
Thank you.
-
Thank you, Dan!
All the best to you.
- Sal
-
Not bad at all! Unless there is a very similar site in your industry of a competitor and risk being accused of "copying".
-Dan
-
Hi Dan
Thank you for your detailed answer. Since you seem very prepared in SEO and SEO related to WordPress, please answer this quick question:
Let's pretend I want to build a new site and I like the WordPress template that you can find on this site:
Is it bad, as far as SEO is concerned, that I build my site using the same template I find on another site? Of course, the content and all the structure will be different; the only similar thing is the template.
Thank you very much.
-
Its not bad at all, I would just recommend using free themes available only within WordPress. Maybe someone else knows of a trusted source of free themes. And yes, you can use the free plugins just the same.
-Dan
-
How bad is it to use a free Wordpress theme and just get the plugins as needed for free as well?
-
Thanks for the responses John and 'walrus'
The only two sites I trust to buy themes from are;
You're right, pro perks discounts are here - and woothemes are included.
Then be sure you read my post on WordPress, and look under the "Themes" section for the best way to set up themes once installed. I've never seen a perfect one for SEO. They're all a little wonky.
Basically I say;
"DO use themes for design elements;
- Colors
- Fonts,
- Page layout
- Headers
- Footers
- Basic social media button stuff
Do NOT use themes for SEO stuff, such as
- Indexation
- Analytics codes
- Titles and descriptions
- RSS feeds
- Menu structure (ideally this is done with WordPress Custom Menus)
Let the Yost SEO plugin handle this stuff! Shut off / do not use these types of SEO functions within the themes."
Hope this helps!
-Dan
-
Agree with John, and you have a WooThemes 40% discount code in PRO Perks section!!!!
-
Hi there,
Yep you can find some excellent premium themes that are SEO friendly - WooThemes has some great ones. I'd also recommend installing the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast to ensure your titles and descriptions (as well as other elements) are properly optimised.
Hope that helps!
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
-
Does the url in for your homepage impact SEO
Is there any harm to SEO having a homepage url that is not clean like www.domain.com. For example citi uses https://online.citi.com/US/login.do Does that matter in any way? Would a company like citi benefit from changing to www.citi.com as their homepage?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kcb81781 -
SEO transfer to new website
My website currently has some strong SEO and i will be re-developing the website on a wordpress platform...which will change many of the existing URL. Will this affect the current pages that are well indexed in Google? Does using Wordpress or changing the URL extension (.html to .php) make a difference? If i want to make a clean transition without effecting our existing SEO...what are some essential steps i need to take? Example. Current page is www.mydomain.com/name.html .... and the new URL would be www.mydomain.com/product/name.php Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Souk0 -
Cookieless subdomains Vs SEO
We have one .com that has all our unique content and then 25 other ccltd sites that are translated versions of the .com for each country we operate in. They are not linked together but we have href lang'd it all together. We now want to serve up all static content of our global website (26 local country sites, .com, .co.uk, .se, etc) from one cookie-less subdomain. Benefit is speed improvement. The question is whether from an SEO perspective, can all static content come from static.domain.com or should we do one for each ccltd where it would come form static.domain.xx (where xx is localised to the domain in question)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aires-fb770 -
If you have an unlimited SEO budget, what would you do?
Here's a bit of background information: I've achieved the targets and is now being offered what is essentially an unlimited budget. I have a nice list of ideas but thought I would the brilliant people here at the SEOMOZ community what they would do. So as to promote as much response as possible, I'm going to keep my list to myself for now. And by "SEO", I mean I can do things like content strategy, blogging, infographics, etc. Shoot away!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andrep0 -
Predictive SEO
Hello all, I am trying to perform a predictive competitive SEO analysis to estimate what I will need to do to surpass my competitors. I am unsure of how to do this and would like some advice or link to an article. What I am trying to do is predict where I can rank in three months, six months and one year as well as what I need to do compared to my competitors. Specifically also to estimate how many links I would need to acquire to both my page as well as domain. I have already pulled my competitors domain links, page links, and age. Adam
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | digitalops0 -
Local SEO for franchises
I have a client who franchises an ice cream shop. It started in Utah and there are several stores there. They are ranking well for local searches based in Utah. Now they have opened a store in Federal Way, WA. How can I get the new location to rank for local keywords on the same website?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fivestarfranchising0 -
Subdomains and SEO - Should we redirect to subfolder?
A new client has mainsite.com and a large numer of city specific sub domains i.e. albany.mainsite.com. I think that these subdomains would actually work better as subfolders i.e mainsite.com/albany rather than albany.mainsite.com. The majority of links on the subdomains link to the main site anyway i.e. mainsite.com/contactus rather than albany.mainsite.com/contactus. Having mostly main domain links on a subdomain doesnt seem like clever link architecture to me and maybe even spammy. Im not overly familiar with redirecting subdomains to subfolders. If we go the route of 301'ing subdomains to subfolders any advice/warnings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndyMacLean0 -
Will having image lightbox with content on a web page SEO friendly?
This website is done in CMS. Will having lightbox pop up with content be SEO friendly? If you go to the web page and click on the images at the bottom of the page. There are lightbox that will display information. Will these lightbox content information be crawl by Google? Will it be consider as content for the url http://jennlee.com/portfolio/bran.. Thanks, John
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VizionSEO990