What to look out for when choosing a blog template for best SEO
When it comes to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), many blog templates are not up to scratch. For example, there is inappropriate use of heading tags, duplicate content, and slow-loading pages.
Let's take a closer look at what factors determine the best blog templates for SEO.
Having substantially, the same content on multiple pages (URLs) of your blog is not good. The full post should only be found on one page of your blog so that page can be optimized for SEO of the keyword of that page.
A work-around for this is the use of an HTML (canonical) link which allows you to publicly specify your preferred version of a URL. In the head section of a duplicate content page, you can specify the URL of the main page. The format of the link is as follows:
<link rel="canonical" href="URL" />
On a blog, this duplicate content issue can arise from full posts being listed on the home page and archive pages. So a good SEO template would only display excerpts of posts on these pages.
Many blog templates use the H1 tag for the blog title on every page, and H2 for post titles. So this is suggesting that the blog title is the most important keyword on every page.
A better approach is to use the H1 tag for post titles on single post pages, and only use the H1 tag on the home page for the blog title. And on inner pages of the blog, use a div tag for the blog title.
Some blog templates may not even use the heading tags at all.
Some blog templates produce very messy HTML code if you view the web page source. This is caused by indented PHP code that upsets the indentation of the HTML to make it difficult to read. Also, the structure of the pages is not optimized.
For example, it's better to have the main content near the top of the source code, above the sidebars. This can easily be achieved using CSS positioning to arrange blocks of content, rather than HTML Tables.
These are not displayed on the web page, so may as well be removed before rendering the page. This could be done by a function included with the theme.
This leads on to page speed, where one major factors is the size and number of image files. So a template using optimized images would be good for the speed factor in SEO.
Other SEO factors are determined by the user of the template, such as keywords used for anchor text of navigation links, the structure of URLs of posts, and the balancing of keywords and content.
Here are some more sites featuring blog traffic tutorials.