In today’s post, I want to share with you a little bit about SEO, SEO Friendly WordPress Themes, and why I chose Standard Theme for my personal blog. If you’ve been reading some of my previous posts or traffic reports, you already know that our site has been crushing it in regards to rankings, traffic, new social media connections and subscribers. Part of the success we’ve had is due to my knowledge of marketing, SEO, and social media… but a big portion is due to the SEO friendly WordPress Theme we’ve selected.
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What Makes Standard SEO Friendly?
The first thing I like about Standard Theme is the coding of the site. In most premium WordPress themes you’ll find them bloated with so many features that they become poorly coded and don’t deliver the quick load times like Standard Theme does. In my marketing agency, we typically custom design WordPress Themes from scratch and I can honestly say that this theme loads faster and is more loved by Google than any of the other themes we’ve tried out or created ourselves.
Additionally, Standard Theme has a great place to add your description to the page right in every post. So, you can simply scroll down after writing your post and add a short SEO friendly description. This eliminates the need for the all-in-one SEO plugins that most use. Remember, Google doesn’t look at keywords, so the page title and description are the biggest keys to success.
Customization and Features
The customization for Standard Theme is pretty simple. Most of the work done on our theme was handled by myself because it is pretty easy to customize without any coding. The WordPress theme comes with some pretty cool widgets and a very neat author box. All of these are designed with site speed and SEO friendliness in mind.
When I customized my theme, I had our developer make some mild CSS changes to the menus. However this was just to get the look and feel I wanted. Standard theme comes out of the gate very clean looking and modern and can be customized very easily from a HTML developer.
By default you have a few different types of post templates to chose from. All of these are also very SEO friendly. I typically use the standard post format which is how this post is written. I have used the quote feature from time to time as well which is also a pretty cool option if you want a quote to stand out. There is also the Image post type, which is neat to have the image of the post be a link to the article. For SEO purposes, I typically stick with the Standard format.
Social Media Integration
A big part of SEO is obviously Social Media in 2013. Standard theme does this pretty well also. There is a separate section in the WordPress Admin feature dedicated for Standard Theme’s functionality.
In this section, you can add your social media icons and links as in my site and customize the order. They are automatically placed in the very top header allowing you to gain more visibility in the social media world. More likes, followers, and plus1′s, equals higher rankings! I added the social media plugin, Shareaholic to my site as well and have seen quite a few social media conversions from these, bumping my pages higher in the search engines.
Obviously, with Social Media playing such a huge roll in SEO rankings in 2013, it is really key to have this built right into your blogging platform. Another reason why I love Standard Theme.
Other features of the SEO Friendly Theme
There are some other really cool features to Standard that I have to mention. One of the things I love is the built in bread crumbs which is also important for onsite SEO. The theme also comes with a sitemap and built-in archives pages which automatically update your blog with the pages and posts you’ve created. You can see my archives page here and my sitemap page here. I love how it groups them into the right categories and makes it easy to find stuff on my site. Lastly, Standard is a Responsive theme so it works great with mobile phones and tablets!
All in all, I highly suggest Standard Theme for its simple features and SEO friendliness And no, I’m not saying this because I want you to click on an affiliate link. All reviews I do are based upon good will and not because I get anything from you buying Standard. My review is because Standard theme is an Amazing SEO Friendly WordPress theme.
Free WordPress Bonuses and Training
If you’re interested on all the SEO marketing I do for my WordPress theme, you might want to check out this posts here which comes with a FREE whitepaper. We also have some free WordPress Videos which you can download here.