3 Tips for Choosing a Wordpress Theme

Stay Away from WordPress Templates with Flash!

It’s only been a few years since the web design community thought that a visually stunning website had to feature Adobe Flash. But now, we know that the problem with Flash is that it isn’t treated like standard XHTML in the search engines. By contrast, Flash can hurt search rankings because Google can’t process all the content contained therein. Additionally, the major search engines have trouble indexing Flash content because it’s an embedded computer program, not plain text.

Then, Stay away from WordPress Themes with Frames (Inline or Otherwise)!

Around the same time as the Flash craze, another big trend in web design was the use of inline frames to display content from other websites on the home page. Then, non-inline frames led to “permanent sidebars” and pages that didn’t move when the user scrolled. This is a trend that has died down, and for good reason. Frames are difficult to use and unintuitive. They result in the user clicking on content that doesn’t move, loads within the website’s XHTML construction or looks completely different from the main content area. In other words, frames cause confusion for the user – and no one wants that. In terms of affecting SEO, websites with frames have no clear “home page” for spiders to identify, track and rank. If you like the look of frames but want a WordPress theme with good SEO capacity, check with the World Wide Consortium (W3C) for helpful tips on making it happen.

Find WordPress Themes with Alternate Text and Title Tags in XHTML

It’s widely agreed upon that using alt and title tags in XHTML is necessary for improving SEO. Those seeking a good WordPress theme for SEO should understand why these tags are so essential to their websites. The first reason is that using these tags improves the overall accessibility of a website. Users who turn off JavaScript or CSS will rely on image titles and alternate text to paint a picture of what’s going on with the content, including the headers and sidebars. The alt tags are read to the visitor by the screen reader software and are therefore essential to good web design. But alt text and title tags are also key to improving a WordPress theme’s SEO. That’s because they can be extended to links; then, both links and images bring in visitors and improve search rankings. Alternate text gets read by spiders and contributes to the site’s keywords and relevance. This means that sites with lots of images but little text can still achieve good search engine rankings, because the alt text tells the story.

Choosing a WordPress theme that’s good for SEO is an important part of the web design process. By following these tips, it can be a relatively easy experience.