Is your wordpress theme doing you justice?

alright guys and girls.

i know many of you might already know this, but being a recent newbie myself i have noticed many noobs on here looking for advice.

i have been working at internet marketing (actually doing, rather than reading) for a few months now.

i am trained as a graphic design, but posses no html skills, this led me down the route of wordpress.

i have noticed a trend whereby people who used to do html are now moving over to wordpress.

i dont need to go through why it is great, there are countless threads on here about it and all over the internet.

but there are two things that some people might not know to make your wordpress site even better.

CORRECT USE OF HEADING TAGS!

there are millions of free and even some paid wordpress themes that get this WRONG.

google loves blogs anyway and you will still see traffic leaving it as it is, but you are limiting search engines from seeing your site how it should be.

- your blog title should only be a H1 on the front page, H2 everywhere else.

- page and post titles should be H1 everywhere else.

- if you have sub sections in pages or posts USE HEADING TAGS to define its importance. (i have seen so many sites making the text bold, this does nothing for your seo)

The easy way to check and correct this is to veiw your site in firefox and go to view>page source. If this is wrong, go to your editor in wordpress admin>appearance>editor and adjust accoringly.

You may notice a change in the site appearance, to correct this you need to edit your css heading styles.

if you are looking for a new theme ALWAYS CHECK the source code on the preview site. if you dont fancy editing the code move onto another theme until you find one that is correct.


My second gripe with some themes is load times, seach engines love fast sites. many images in the themes out there are not optimised in the slightest.

when you download a theme always try to sqeeze the files sizes of the images down as much as possible without loosing quality.

when the site is up ALWAYS USE WP-SUPER-CACHE!

and if possible host your pictures and videos on another server and embed them in the site. this way search engines can see your site much quicker.


a good tool for checking load times is firebug (part of seo book) google it and install it in firefox. you will need to go to the net tab and reload the page. anything under 2-3 seconds is great, if not you need to do some more work.

sorry for the long post, hope this helps some people out.