How to choose a friendly theme for SEO?

[BillEssley]

I'm searching for a theme about travel/hotels and a theme for my personal blog but I want it friendly with SEO so my keywords later can get higher rankings on search engines.
please share your advice things need to consider before choosing a theme?
My cms is wordpress and it is setting up.

 

[Nytshade]

The only thing I look at when buying a theme is whether the theme is mobile responsive and user friendly, navigation-wise. When it comes to SEO I rely on the free SEO by Yoast plugin for submitting sitemap and creating tags (title, meta, open graph, description).

What I've found about using seo tools that come with the theme is that sometimes search engines and social networks take time to read the tags especial open graph, which will mess up the title, description and image when sharing on social networks. So Yoast is always up to date with this type of stuff and has good support.

Choose any theme that is easy on the eye, simple navigation and mobile responsive then use plugins for SEO. Hope that helps.

 

[elcidofaguy]

When it comes to on page SEO - the only thing that matters is what is in your head.... No plugin is going to automate keyword research and magically insert them into your post/page URL, title, description, heading tags and content etc... Plugins such as Yoast help - but you need to add the details yourself.... When it comes to themes make sure to check how it looks on mobile/tablets as well...
A good place to find themes relating to hotel/travel is theme forest - you can find a lot of them using the search e.g. [URLnf=http://themeforest.net/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&term=travel+hotels]here[/URLnf] as well as using G... There are literally tons of themes for these niches out there...

 

[Nytshade]

Nytshade

This is really good advise, no theme or plugin will do the on-page seo for you.

Elcidofaguy Thnx for the info about creating a child theme, I just updated my theme yesterday and I'm currently fixing the footer and header settings because they changed after the update. I didn't know anything about this so Thnx my friend

 

[danny83]

The less edit you have to do the better theme is, so you wont waste a lot of time adjusting site to your PSD mockup. When it comes to Search Engine Optimization, SEO by Yoast or All in One SEO will make SEO part much easier.

 

[elcidofaguy]

elcidofaguy

That's a valid point... The less customization you need to do the better... In addition I also recommend that you create a child theme so that changes made to CSS, footer, header etc is not overridden when upgrading your theme....

Here is some info on [URLnf="http://codex.wordpress.org/Child_Themes"]Child Themes[/URLnf] from Wordpress org which can help on this specific point for starters...

 

[wms]

I'm searching for a theme about travel/hotels and a theme for my personal blog but I want it friendly with SEO so my keywords later can get higher rankings on search engines.
please share your advice things need to consider before choosing a theme?
My cms is wordpress and it is setting up.

When it comes to on page SEO - the only thing that matters is what is in your head....

Agree with @elcidofaguy and I can give some suggestions to @BillEssley on how to check a theme is friendly for SEO or not.

It's very easy. Firstly, you need to know about on-page SEO, how then you can find in this search engine optimization section on this forum

When you know how is SEO on page.

Open a theme themeforest, templatemonster...or some where else that you are going to buy it, using cache:URL_of_Theme and paste it into your google search query , this way is for themes crawled by google

for example:

cache:https://www.webmastersun.com

What about new themes? how to check for new theme? we couldn't use this way when it has still not yet cached by google or other search engines, install a supported tool for your chrome/firefox browser like web developer and disable all styles of this theme, you can see plain text of that theme include heading, html tags..etc..without styles.

Apllying SEO on-page techniques that you learned and now you will know it is friendly theme for SEO or not.

Hope this helps!

 

[ericplotz1]

To answer your question All newer premium themes and their framework are pretty much similar. Here, I will make it easy for you.

-Use "Divi" or "Be" themes. These are the cleanest and easiest themes to use that I've found. I really like "Be". Plus you don't have to use an activation code with Be so you don't have to buy it over and over. Divi is the same but I like "Be" and all of the layouts. It's pretty sick.

-Use Yoast as suggested.

-Also W3TC with cloudflare. But watch tutorials on setting up w3tc.

THen the rest, as stated above, is on you. Keyword analysis and filling in the proper fields. Alt tags, metas, and how your content and site is structured. No framework or pre-inserted fields can help you with that.

But if you are looking for a clean theme definitely "Be" and "Divi" are the cleanest.

 

[iTeachBlogging]

When I am looking for a new theme for WordPress, I run the sample design thru Pingdom and Google Page Speed Analysis.

These two tests give me a good idea of how the site is going to do right out of the gate. I am actually working on a blog post right now on this topic. I had a design that I loved it but it was slowing down my blog a great deal. As a result, I decided to redesign.