SEO tip for Wordpress themes

One tip I rarely see mentioned (or maybe I’m just reading at the wrong places) when people talk about making Wordpress SEO-friendly is: make sure your theme loads content near the top so your bots get to the content quickly. In the source code, you do not want tons of header, sidebar or javascript code above your first post. Ideally, I think your first post should begin on the first screen when you’re looking at the source code.

You can have a left sidebar that loads after the content. It’s just that a lot of designers don’t bother. With some themes, you can just move the sidebar call (php get_sidebar();) from above the content to just above the footer (or the other sidebar if you have two). But usually you’ll need to do some major tweaking to the stylesheet to get everything positioned as it should be.  That’s why themes with only righthand sidebars are so popular.

And yet, having the sidebars on the right isn’t enough if you have all your pages listed in a row above your content. I have seen one or two themes that load those after the content, but they’re rare. My preferred solution, when I like a theme that’s set up with a row across the top, is to rip that row right out and stick the navigation in a sidebar. As you see here, I just have four links across the top (which I think is okay, but your mileage may vary) and the rest of my (less important) pages are in the sidebar.

But if you’ve looked at my source code, you’re probably wondering why I have a big pile of javascript at the top. Well, that is courtesy of the otherwise lovely and useful aLinks plugin which for some reason is coded to dump all that crap into your header instead of stuffing it away nicely. I’ve tried to fix it myself, but as I had not the slightest clue what I was doing, the results were, um, interesting.

By the way, if anyone knows how to alter plugins that stuff javascript at the top of the page, slowing loading time and irritating the bots we want to love our sites, please teach me or post about it or something. I’ve tried to research this, and I’m sure it’s a skill a lot of us would benefit from.

1. Link a Dink – better than Alinks
2. Bad code in Wordpress posts
3. Wordpress: how to have different sidebars on static front page
4. Make a leaderboard load after the content in Wordpress
5. Fixing Wordpress 2.5: Baltic Amber Themes plugin

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