Behind most successful websites there is usually an eye-appealing and user-friendly design, but behind all successful websites is well constructed SEO, even if the owner meant to do it or not. SEO is a common acronym used among website developers to describe methods used to to improve websites in the eye of search engines, primarily the big G. It stands for search engine optimization and can be as simple as adding those dandy little title tags to your header to as specific as making sure you have your post titles wrapped in h1 tags up as high on the page as you can get them. Direct from Wikipedia:

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. Typically, the higher a site's "page rank" (i.e, the earlier it comes in the search results list), the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO can also target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

I recommend following these tips that I picked up throughout my escapades as a theme developer to make sure your beautiful and elegant-looking WordPress theme is as SEO friendly as it can get, trust me, this could only add more value to it.

Tip 1 - Wrap Post Titles in H1 Tags

This is very simple. When search engines see H1 tags, it is assumed that whatever is inside the tags is an important element on the page. Since post titles are important elements (right?), shouldn't they be wrapped in H1 tags? You probably have something like this in your index.php file:

<a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="<?php the_title(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a>

Simple wrap that in H1 tags and you're good to go. You may have to make changes to your stylesheet after you make the change so don't go doing this on a live website without testing it first.

Tip 2 - Wrap the Title and Slogan of Your Website in H1 and H2 Tags

If you have a theme that displays the title and slogan of a website rather than a banner image or something, then this tip applies to you. Be sure to wrap the title of the website in H1 tags and the slogan in H2 tags. You should end up with something similar to the following:

<h1><a href="<?php bloginfo('siteurl');?>"><?php bloginfo('name');?></a></h1>
<h2><?php bloginfo('description');?></h2>

Tip 3 - Put Your Banners in H1 Tags

If you have a theme that uses banners instead of displaying the title and slogan of a website, then this tip applies to you. Instead of using regular image tags to show your banner, use H1 tags instead. This is how it would basically work out:

<div id="header">
     <a title="Wordpress Themes" href="http://www.forthelose.org">
          <h1>ForTheLose.org</h1>
     </a>
</div>

Once you have that in, you'll just need to make a few edits to your stylesheet like so:

#header{
     background-image: url(images/logo.png) no-repeat;
     height: 90px;
     width: 255px;
}
 
#header h1{
     display: block;
     height: 90px;
     width: 255px;
     text-indent: -9999px; //Removes the H1 text from visitors view
}

Your visitors still see a clickable banner image but now the search engines see the title of your website wrapped in important H1 tags and not just an image and an alt description.

Tip 4 - Fix Your Title Tags

Title tags are what show the title of the page your own at the top of your browser window. These are very important for SEO purposes and should not be overlooked. navigate to your header.php file and paste this in between your title tags:

<?php if (is_home () ) { bloginfo('name'); echo ' - ' ; bloginfo('description');}
elseif ( is_category() ) { single_cat_title(); echo ' - ' ; bloginfo('name');}
elseif (is_single() ) { single_post_title(); echo ' - ' ; bloginfo('name');}
elseif (is_page() ) { single_post_title(); echo ' - ' ; bloginfo('name');}
else { wp_title('',true); } ?>

Simple and effective. That wasn't so hard, was it?

Tip 5 - Keep Important Things at the Top

Sidebar is King. That sound weird to you? Yeah, that's because you're probably used to hearing Content is King. When building your theme, don't go putting the sidebar together before all of the content (posts, comments, etc...) in your HTML. Search engines see things that are at the top (or near the top) of the page as more important than things at the bottom. The higher you can get your post titles to appear on the page the better off you are.

You can get more creative with this like I have here on ForTheLose.org. The speech bubble at the top of every page is full of short and sweet sentences with links to internal pages anchored with strong keywords. This is great for SEO and lets the search engines categorize my site better.

These are some of the more important SEO features you can build into your theme to make it more susceptible to being treated well by search engines. The rest is up to the author of the blog himself. He could download plugins like All-In-One SEO, build sitemaps and submit them to search engines, fill his post titles with strong, relevant keywords, and use heading tags appropriately. You as the theme developer have done all you can do.

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