The first thing to note is that SEO optimization is not one (or a few) big things, but a multitude of small things that add up together. Google says there are more than 200+ factors that in aggregate determine the worth of a website and determine its ranking on the search engines.
So, here we need to understand that not a particular set of things is going to make your website perfectly stand on the first page in Google.
While saying that we also have to be aware of the fact that some of the ranking factors hold more weight and play a greater role in SE ranking than others. This means every ranking factor is not equal in importance. Here are important things to consider while choosing an SEO friendly theme.
👉 You may want to read about Free WordPress blog themes
Table of Contents
The code
For a theme to be SEO friendly the source code of the theme should be of good quality. Although the quality of the code doesn’t directly affect the SEO, however because of the bad code the loading speed of the website can drop significantly. Now When your website loads slowly it will definitely hamper your optimization score.
Therefore it is very important to find a theme that has quality code and loads faster. You can test the loading speed of the theme by using the Pingdom speed test tool, google pageSpeed insight, or gtmetrix.
Though the code structure cannot be evaluated very easily, it is wiser to pick up the theme that loads pretty faster.
Mobile-friendliness
Before picking up a theme for your next project make sure that it is fully responsive and it adapts to your customers’ chosen device. In case your theme is not friendly to the mobile device it is not going to rank good on google.
If you are not sure about the responsiveness of your theme you can run a mobile-friendly test here and figure it out. Also, you can use MobiReady to test the website performance on mobile devices.
HTTP Requests
Some of the themes are too heavy with a lot of resources to load. You should never choose a too heavy theme with lots of resources as it will drastically increase the loading time. A theme with less than 20 requests is considered better.
Browsers spend more than 75% of their time on fetching the external components like scripts, stylesheets, and images. So when the request is minimized it makes a big impact on response time.
Cross-browser compatible
A good theme should make your website appear as close to the same as possible when viewed under all major web browsers. With the number of browsers being available today, ensuring the cross-browser compatibility with only one or two of them will definitely not help you.
you can test the compatibility for cross-browser using one of these tools.
Website Structure
In order to create effective and easy internal linking structures the website architecture and breadcrumbs are very essential.
The bots can crawl and index your pages only if the inner links, navigation, and contents are well structured. This will, in turn, improve the chance of ranking higher in Google search.
Not only to the search engines but also this is very important for increasing the quality of visitors experience to help them find the information more quickly
So, follow these checklists to find out the best SEO friendly theme for your next website.
