What is an SEO friendly design – Highlighting your content with it
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Ensuring that you have a SEO friendly layout is very important because, even if you have great content, and you use a fancy SEO unfriendly wordpress template, then your content may not be highlighted/indexed well on the search engines.
Let’s see what exactly are SEO friendly wordpress templates.
As i had mentioned in an earlier post – a two column template is optimal for feeding food to the crawlers.
Three things to note in the design are –
- What does the crawler see first?
- Does the wordpress template highlight the keywords?
- Does the wordpress template tell the crawler what’s important and what is not?
- Does the wordpress template say “bye” to the crawler?
Enough for creative ideas- let’s go technical!
- What does the crawler see first?
Don’t misunderstand this with what you see first on the page? When a spider crawls your page, it sees the code, and according to the code, what does the spider see first?
It is recommended that the spider sees your articles/post first.And not the category links or sidebar.
To ensure this, there is a neat trick!
Just leave a blank column if you are following a three/two column template at the top.See more instructions here.This way, the crawler will jump to the articles first, and then move to the links sidebar.
Another way to curb this is to use a template with a right hand sidebar.
- Does the wordpress template highlight the keywords?
Okay, so you have a keyword rich title and a keyword rich article. You see yourself on the article that the keywords often repeat, and the ads triggered on Google Adsense too is related to the keyword. Cool!
But do you know if the crawlers see the keywords highlighted?
If you want the crawler to see the keywords highlighted, use the following tricks!
- Instead of BOLD tag, use the STRONG tag to bold the keywords.SE crawlers will ONLY pick up the STRONG tag keywords and will avoid the BOLD tag. So if you are seeing the keywords in bold text, it is only a visual appearance – convert all those BOLD tags to STRONG today, if you want the SE’s to pick up what you want to show them.
- Does the wordpress template tell the crawler what’s important and what is not?
Damn – how do we get that done? Easy. Make sure that your template uses H1,H2,H3… coding for texts.
The idea is such – there are keywords on your blog out of which some are more important and some less important.If you put the text in H1 tag, it means that is the most important keyword and if you use H2…H3 and so forth,the importance decreases accordingly.
It’s like feeding the spider in a course. First the Starter, then the Main course, then the Dessert…you know it’s easy to remember that way.
- Does the wordpress template say “bye” to the crawler?
When the crawler finishes crawling your blog, what does it see(the last thing)? This is your blogs “bye bye” to the crawler.I recommend that you provide the best highlighted stuff at this point. So that the crawler remembers what your site is all about.Unfortunately, many template uses the footer.Big mistake! Use a 2.0 footer with H1 tags and links to your best posts.These will be crawled and indexed with more importance.
Damn – after all why do you want to waste your real estate at the footer?
Now, these four things combined decides if you have a SEO friendly wordpress/blogger template or not.Check today if tour template meets the requirements if not, switch to a new template today. Man, there are lot’s available these days. Isn’t it?
Amazing advice Mani. Many points were totally new to me. Stumbled.
PChere’s last blog post..9rules Goes Retro: Notes, Clips, my.9r on Chawlk
Thanks for the stumble PChere.
Hi, thanks Mani, I’m learning too much from your blog. Bookmarked.
Hi,Man, Awesome tips, especially the point about what crawler see, many of the designer/developers do this mistake, they put navigation links on the left. Second point which you discussed about footer is the most important one, i think.Thanks buddy
Buddy, one of the link is not working on your article. Under this headingWhat does the crawler see first? there is link “more” which is not working
Thanks
Reading Mani makes me think that wordpress is waaaaayy better than blogger. I’m considering switching.
Irvin, WP is indeed better than blogger. And I’m glad I could convince you.
Started my Blog in WP just now. still looking for layouts. ^_^
I wish SEO-friendly layouts were easier and could be done with fewer hacks and floats! I don’t think there is an “uncompromising” SEO-friendly layout which works with variable-height columns!
Many great points. Thanks
Nice post Mani ! I love your language.
However, I don’t understand what you have posted about footer. Can you give me more examples? What it should be?
No footer but links?
Thanks. ^_^
Hi Karthik,
No doubt you have a great blog…..anyways I noticed a small button in your blog, which I think is annoying you, so why don’t you simply hide it
Regards
Sai
Thanks nice read and a great way to highlight your content…
great tips !!thanks
nice tips thanx alot
wow, thanks for this useful info
Nicely explained. Easy to read and understand. Thanks