SEO friendly themes, particularly free versions, have become extremely popular over the last 12 months. The problem is, whilst they claim to be SEO friendly, is that they are not truly SEO friendly. So what makes a theme SEO friendly? To avoid confusion, the term ‘theme’ and ‘template’ are basically the same so I will stick to the term ‘theme’.
This question is debatable since many SEO friendly themes are relying on plugins that every theme can use to improve their blogs SEO outcomes.
If you ignore the plugins which assist with keywords, tags, descriptions and titles, and the content that is generated by the blog owner, there is only a few areas remaining that can help with a blogs SEO.
Page loading sequence can certainly help. Having the header load followed by the content before the sidebars is an import issue. If the pages code is going to break it is generally caused by a widget in the sidebar. If the content has already been spidered, then this does not become a big issue. Many SEO friendly themes still load the sidebars before the content. This is one area that is quick and easy to check yourself.
Another area of your blogs design that can help with SEO is in the categories and archives sections. If these only produce snippets of each post them you will avoid any issues with duplicate content. You can use a plugin, however the fewer plugins you use the better. Again, many SEO friendly themes do not use snippets. They use the full posts.
The final area that needs close inspection is in the footer. Because some of these themes are free, the links to the theme creator can be sold resulting in a link to sites that you may not want to be associated with. Check each link the footer carefully to ensure it does lead to the themes creator’s pages.
Before jumping on an SEO friendly theme, make sure it is ‘friendly’ first.
I think it pays to compress the CSS file and the HTML so that the page can load quicker…which should make the crawlers that much happier when they visit your site.