Here are the best ever Wordpress themes that are SEO friendly.(Updated on Aug 2008)

No messy tweaks and work around SEO techniques. These themes have been tested(code validated) for stability - and SEO friendliness.

I can assure you that they are good for the search engines and the spiders will love them. Many of them are focused on content and simplicity and may not carry unnecessary frills like flash and Ajax. And no fancy stuff too. Just pure search engine love!

The following SEO metrics were taken into consideration when ranking the themes.

• Highlighting content.
• Onsite optimization.
• CSS/XHTML validation.
• Unique SEO friendly page titles.
• SEO friendly layout.
• Optimum coding.
• Look and feel

Steps to completely optimizing these Wordpress themes

Step 1 - Download and install these themes and activate them (as per the general rules)

Step 2 - Though all of them are generally good on SEO, I recommend you also use the 24 must have plugins on them so that you get the edge over others. Remember that million others may also use the themes, so you have to make a difference.

Step 3 - Ensure that you follow the “SEO for Wordpress guide” and change your “yet another wordpress installation” into “super charged SEO blog”

	Template/theme name	Screenshot
1	Your blog 2.0 theme
2	Cutline 3
3	Sodelicious black 10
4	Pop blue
5	Lose my mind
6	Procut 1
7	Big blue
8	Shopaholic Fashionista
9	Fresh Apple
10	Tech 9
11	Limau Orange
12	Modern Paper 1.0
13	Gangway 1.0
14	Blue Earth 1.0
15	01 Dragee 1.0
16	Redie 3.0
17	Magazine 1.0
18	Fleurdelys 1.0
19	Ice 3.17
20	Wp Inspirat
21	Arrow 1.0
22	My journal hypereal
23	Blue Pix
24	Simple la Bob
25	Upstart blogger modicus
26	Box set 1.0
27	The ideal website 1.1
28	Blue Bird 1.0
29	Modern blue Green
30	Colors Idea 2.1
31	Fastway 1.0
32	Unthemed Clean Blue
33	Blue Meanie 1.1
34	Spotlight 1.3
35	Breaking News 1.0
36	Prosumer 1.4
37	Stardust 1.0
38	Techozoic 1.2
39	Classy 1.0
40	A screen near you 1.0
41	Drikattruu 1.1
42	TM Clear N1 1.0
43	QWILM
44	ADReu Theme 1.2
45	Ambient Glo 1
46	Book idea 1.1
47	Genki Theme
48	Shinra house blu
49	Cresto 1.0
50	Deep red 1.0
51	WP Zilla 1.0
52	Emerald 1.0
53	Ajax Berlee 1.0
54	Red Dodo 1.0
55	Simple Theme 1.1
56	SB Blanc 1.0
57	Minus 19
58	Freedom Green
59	PS3Ku 1.0
60	Firstd 1.0
61	Light Col 1.0
62	Mc Mac 1.0
63	Rojo
64	New Yorker 30
65	Liquid 2.0
66	Basic Concept 1.0
67	Patriotic 1.0
68	Natheless 1.0
69	DS Rosa 1.0
70	Non Zero Green
71	Durable 0.2.5
72	Tree V2
73	Cat sitting on a wall
74	Zen minimalist
75	Blue Zinfandel 1.0
76	Bloody gray 1.1
77	Simply Basic 1.5
78	Livingos delta 1.2
79	Insomnia Reloaded
80	Vertigo Squared 1.0
81	FH Freedom Blue 2
82	Karma fruit 1.0
83	Tranquility 1.0
84	Kiwi 1.0
85	Rale 1.0.2
86	Scroller Brown 1.0
87	Clementine
88	New typo 1.0
89	Barracus 1.0
90	Dipdolt white
91	Sammy 1.2
92	TM 3 0.7
93	KISS 1.0
94	Fauxed 1.0
95	Newsday 1.0
96	Orange scale Laila butterfly
97	F nice 1.0
98	Plain text blog 2.0
99	Descent Green
100	Dixie Belle
101	Yakuter Tema

Thinking of submitting your blog to Google? If you’d like a good reputation with Google, make sure you have the following things ready prior to submission.

There are two ways to submit to google. One - the boring way and two - the smart way.

Now, let’s check if your blog is all geared up before the Google spiders visits your blog.

1. Rich content
   Google loves rich unique content.So when the spiders are at your blog, you should keep ready food for them.Write at least 20 quality unique posts in all the categories that you wish to write. Don’t miss any category, let’s make it full and final.Yes, you can add on any pages later, but doing it in a systematic way will only help you always.
   Wordpress users-
   This ensures that Google crawls and index all your category pages(provided there is a post in each category).
   Blogger users-
   Make sure that there is a post under each label.This way the crawler will not miss any category page.
2. Onpage optimization essentials
   Before submitting to google, make sure that you have the onsite SEO tweaks done. If you missed the discussions here, they are Title tags , Permalinks , Keyword density , Footer etc.
3. Outgoing links to quality websites
   There is a common misconception that outgoing links without any incoming links will harm your site’s reputation.True.But if you manage to incorporate some links to credit worthy sites related to your blog’s content, then it makes google easy to figure out your sites content and assign you a category.These trust worthy sites can be wikipedia, google help pages, yahoo directories or trust worthy sites already in your niche.
   - Some quick notes here -
   - Don’t include too many outgoing links, adequate will be 1-2 per post.
   - Link with good anchor text(related to your keyword), not with “here” or “check this”.
   - Do not link to ill-reputed sites or non-related websites out of your niche.
4. No broken links please
   It is recommended that you mend all your broken links before submitting to Google. You can use a broken link checker to help you analyze the broken links in your blog. Trust me, many a times you can’t trust human eyes and it’s wise to use a tool to help you out.
5. Sitemap
   This is not necessary, but it is good if you have a sitemap ready listing all the pages that you wish to index and avoiding the ones you wish to. Wordpress users can make use of plugins likeGoogle sitemap generator, and bloggers can simply use their atom feed as a sitemap.(This can be done later after submitting your site as well.)
6. Robots.txt
   It’s very important. Make sure that you’ve not exlcuded any folder from being crawled or any crawler from crawling your blog.More authoritative ideas on tweaking the Robots file here.

Once, these things are taken care of, it’s safe to go ahead and submit your blog to google, either the boring way or the smart way.

Wordpress is easy to configure - but doing some cool little tweaks(which are also easy) can give you outstanding results - be it traffic or Search Engine ranks that you are looking for. here’s a compilation of the best SEO tweaks for Wordpress.

1. Custom permalinks - Undoubtedly the best one suggested by SEO’s. This tweak requires you to change the default page title from (www.yourdomaincom/?p=5) to a much SEO and user friendly www.yourdomainname.com/category/page title.
   This can be done by following the two below steps.
   1. Goto Options > Permalinks
   2. Change the default setting to custom with the following code - /%category%/%postname%/
2. Custom Page Title
   Page titles in Wordpress are by default like this - Blog Name - Post title
   A better title would be Post Title - Blog name, as the important keywords are in the post title.Search Engines love it so make the change today.
3. Make your titles links
   If your theme doesn’t have links on your article titles, make the change today. Convert them to links so that search engines can detect them easily and humans as well(if they are planning to use the link). Without the link, it’s impossible(almost) to link to that post right?
   This tweak simple incorporates the permanent link to your post headings.
   In your Main Index Template and Page Template, find the code for the post tiltle, it would look like this - without the square brackets but these > < .
   

   [h2][?php the_title(); ?][/h2]

Now, replace it with

[h2][a href="[?php the_permalink() ?]” rel=”bookmark” title=”Permanent Link to [?php the_title(); ?]“][?php the_title(); ?][/a][/h2]

(replace teh square brackets with these>< )

These are the Top 5 Wordpress tweaks that will give you that extra edge over normal wordpress non-SEO’d blogs. If all these tricks are combined with the ones that I’ve mentioned recently, i assure you’ll be a hot pick for the search engines!

I receive emails from readers(though not regularly) once in awhile, appreciating the content on this blog and how it helped them.

Most of the times it’s about how an article educated them on an SEO topic which sounded jargon prior to reading the post. I’m extremely happy to read these readers comments. Because, the purpose of this blog is to make aware the average blogger what SEO is and how simple it can be even without the technical knowledge.

So, I’ve decided to give an opportunity to all my readers to let me know what they think of the blog. If you have something to say, please shoot a mail to mani(a)dailydoseofinternet.com, in the form of a testimonial, and i shall feature it on the right hand panel with a link to your blog as well.

I’ve put together a testimonial by Ankesh Kothari(the guy who suggested the Buy me a Beer plugin for John Chow) today.If you can write a better one, let me know.

Hey, Thanks for visiting this blog through Stumbleupon.
I’d appreciate if you’d click the “I like it”(Thumbs up image) button on the toolbar.

How did i guess that you visited this blog through stumble upon?

Simple - 90% and more of my visitors these days(from the last stumble on June 1) are from Stumble upon. So i assumed you are a referral !

So, I’m sacrificing my rest 10% readers (feed readers and direct)with this post?

No.

It is more likely that out of the 10 visitors on this site, 8-9 are through Stumble upon - Just like you!!!

And the best way to convert a stumble upon visitor to your loyal visitor is to get his attention on the first visit - just i like i did with this post!

Meanwhile, this is a search engine optimization, blogging related blog written by Mani Karthik, an SEO from India.
Curious?

See my SEO related posts here.

Once again Thanks very much for visiting - don’t forget to click the green thumbs up button on the tools bar!!

(Sshh..Meanwhile, you can write a similar post on your blog too to attract stumble upon visitors. What say?)

Gracias!
Mani

Not getting traffic even after writing good content on your blog?

It may be because you have not optimized your blog for google. If you didn’t know, optimizing a blog is different from optimizing a normal website.The best part is that it’s easier.

Before reading further, please refer these articles.

Here are a couple of sure-shot search engine optimization tips that will help you optimize your blog for Google.

Implement these tips today and i can assure you that your statistics will improve in a few days.

1- Change your title urls/permalinks

Is your blog generating dynamic numbered template headings? Like "www.yourblog.com/entry.php?id=3" ?

Big mistake - you should change this to "www.yourblog.com/your-post-title.htm"

If you are using wordpress you can simply change this from the publish settings.On blogger, you don’t have to worry much as by default the pages generated are titled based on your title usage. In this case you have to be careful with your title.How to write titles that attract traffic?

This is because search engines can understand what your content is based on your url/permalinks. So a url that is generated out of the title makes more sense than a randomly generated numbered page.

2- Make your layout SEO friendly

This may be a little complicated to understand for those who are not familiar with web-design. But let me put it the simple way. Make sure that you have a template that meet the following criteria.

- In your source code, make sure that there is less junk(CSS and HTML) and more of content.

- In your basic template structure, the links(categories or links to your best posts etc) are the first thing that bots will crawl.Example, in a three column template,if your links are included on the left hand side, wen can ensure that bots crawl them first and them move on to the body.Check out this post LINK where I’ve clearly stated on how to select a perfect SEO friendly template for your blog.

3 – Use the Footer.

Bots remember the first and last things they see on your site to a certain level of importance. Like for instance,the footer. Suppose you have a footer that says - copyright - yourblog.com. Change it to "copyright - yourblog.com - SEO tips and Tutorials", this way bots will remember the SEO tips and tutorials keyowrd they read on your blog.Make sure you don’t spam your footer though - with more number of keywords.

4 – Add Image ALT tags.

In free blogging patforms like blogger or wordpress, unfortunately image ALT tags are not used by default. Make sure that in every image you upload(on every article or even the bullet images on the template), you use the keywords as ALT tags make sure you don’t spam it again, but optimum usage is recommended.

5 - Interlinking your posts.

Extremely important point.This is a pain taking process honestly. Because you got to dig out your old posts, get their urls, remember them ah! Pain in the arse! But let me tell you, it’s a good habit to maintain a spreadsheet with all your old and present urls to posts updated, so that you can hand pick them any time.Using this, post links to your old posts within posts. This will ensure that none of your pages are brushed beneath the carpet but are equally given importance and the Google juice will equally fill them.

These 5 tweaks will ensure you that none of the articles, that you wrote with much pain, is left un-noticed but helps you get more traffic on the engines.

An email from Anna Milkovich almost made my heart skip a beat. It was a one line email and it asked - What is search engine optimization really?

It was the most simple question one could ask me on SEO, but ironically nobody have asked me this question yet on email.I must appreciate Anna to have taken the pain in writing to me asking this question.

In fact, what hit me was - i assumed that everyone knew what SEO is, and nobody would be asking such a simple question to me. But hey - somebody have asked me and here I am trifled!

So, this piece of information is for Anna.It’s basic Search engine optimization stuff, so regular readers may find this boring.

Search Engine Optimization is a practice or a set of procedures done by website owners to get more traffic to their site from search engines.

In layman’s language, all that stuff done to get more people to visit your website and thereby get money from it.

There are different ways and procedures to get this done. There are the bad methods and the good methods. The good methods are the ones that are advised by Google and the other prominent search engines, while they do not want you to do the bad methods(known as Black Hat Search Engine Optimization).

In SEO, many of the procedures are advised by Google as they bring traffic to any website on the internet than any other search engine.Many webmasters like to follow the SEO measures advocated by them.So don’t be amazed to see people talking about only Google when talking about SEO.

According to the Wikipedia,

Search engine optimization (SEO), a subset of search engine marketing, is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (”organic” or “algorithmic”) search results.

The idea of SEO is based on the fact that - Many people use the search engines to find information on the internet. And when they use a search engine, they rely on the top most results that appear on the search engine page. Therefore what every Search Engine Optimization guru, tries to do is get their website in the top results for a particular search item.And for a single website, when they have optimized their pages so as to appear on the top results for all the search terms they are interested in - he is likely to be successful.

For example,if you see this blog. We are on the top results for the search term(called keyword) - “Iphone themes“. So whenever someone searches for iphone themes on google using the keyword - iphone themes- this blog would come up in the top 5 and the user is likely to visit it.

That’s the whole idea. Now, getting your blog to come up in the top results isn’t simple.It involves lot of thinking and idea implementation.If you will go through this blog’s archives you will see many useful pieces of tips regarding how you can successsfully use search engine optimization techniques to make your blog come up on the top pages of search engines.

Some of them are -

Keyword research
Keyword density
Title tag usage
Linking
Meta tags and a whole lot.

I normally refer a few blogs to my readers such as - Michael Gray’s SEO blog, SEO round table, SEOmoz and the like. They are indeed great resources on search engine optimization. you may also want to read Matt Cutt’s (who’s a Google employee) blog where he posts his thoughts on search engine optimization.

Here’s part 1 if you missed. It is normal to have a blogger’s block.Finding topics to blog can be quite confusing. As said in the earlier post we have tools that will give us suggestions on what the world is searching for and so search engine optimizers recommend you to select one of them and start blogging. Fair enough! But as (link) Michael Gray said, there are two schools of thought here - one is to blog for money and other is to blog for passion. As Michael rightly puts it - you need to strike a balance between both. The methods discussed in the earlier post(part 1) were mainly finding topics to blog for money. Those are the methods that will help you find keywords people are searching for, you may not have a liking to them though.

Today, let’s see if there are any interesting places to find things to blog about. Well, what came to my mind first is the statistics page. All of us like to check our statistics page. I do it when i have nothing to do online. Do you see a gold mine right there?

Yes, the referrals page is a gold mine. If you watch carefully there are those Google referrals links that bought new visitors to your page.(Can be seen in the referrals section). It may look something like -

http://www.google.com/search?q=podcasting%20blogger&ie=utf-8&amp;amp;oe=utf-8&aq=t&amp;rls=com.google:en-US:official&client=firefox

Now, this tells us that somebody was searching for -”podcasting blogger”- and your blog showed up in the results page (not necessarily at the top).This may be because of two reasons.
1- Your blog contained the exact information what the visitor was looking for.
2 - Your blog contained parts of information what he was looking for but it showed up on the SERPs page.

Let’s look at scenario two. If the information the visitor was looking for is available partly on your site, it is more likely that the information he is looking for (now available to you from the url) is related to your blog.

Pick up these informations from the referral url. If he was looking for “Free mp3’s” don’t go ahead and dive in write a post on Free mp3s. Goto the tools mentioned in post 1 (where and how to find topics to blog) and research along the lines of this keyword. Find a match and write an article with the proper keyword density.Ensure that you make good titles that will be easily picked up by the search engines.

This way we can ensure that
- we deliver the articles people are searching for right now.
- we find topics that are related to your blog/articles.
- decrease the bounce rate of visitors.

For more SEO related articles, click here

If you are serious about Search Engine Optimization, you should be knowing this already. But for the blogging enthusiast readers, this might come in as a news - useful and handy.

Finding your measureables in Search Engine Optimization is a hurdle. It’s difficult to find out what gave you the results.
Many a times, people just go on adding links, exchanging them, commenting, link buying and so on randomly. And the time frame involved(mostly 2-3 months or less) in getting a significant result makes it even more harder to find out what is that one particular thing that you did - that pushed you through the ranks.

As, I’ve always told, it’s always a good idea to keep track of what you are doing, your statistics that is. Well, I’m not talking about the web statistics, but the SEO ones. There are Search Engine Optimization softwares that help you do this, but if you can’t afford one, or want to do it the manual way - cheers to you, i prefer that way too.This way you can know what factor helped you most to increase your rank or what combination of factors helped you through the SERPs. Because in many cases, it’s not just one factor that will help you earn your rank, but a combination of factors like backlinking, indexing and landing page optimization.

Keeping a track of these factors will not only help you in finding the measureables but also help you to predict your rank even.

Here are a few things that you have to constantly keep track of. Also listed is how to get them done easily.

1 - Number of backlinks

As everybody knows, quality backlinks matters most when google ranks you on the SERPs.So keep a spread sheet with the tabs updated daily/weekly.Check your statistics o Google and Yahoo.

To check your backlinks on google type, link:www.yourdomain.com on the Google search and this will give you the list of websites that’s linked back to you, in particular order.

2 - Number of pages indexed on Google

This factor has less importance in judging your rank but, if you have optimized all the pages that’s on the index, then it sure helps. It won’t hurt you anyway.

To find out the number of pages indexed on Google type, site:www.yourdomain.com , on the Google search and it will show you all the pages from your site that is on Google’s index.

3 - Number of .edu backlinks

Edu backlinks are a crucial factor that will help you to cut the competition on Google SERPS.These backlinks are considered as authoritative by Google as they are difficult to get. Well, to check the number of edu backlinks, use yahoo search. Type this i the search bar - linkdomain:www.yourdomain.com site:.edu

This will give you all the links from .edu domains to your site.Remember Yahoo also counts the NOFOLLOW links unlike Google.

4 - Rank for a particular keyword

This is rather obvious, keep a track of where your site ranks for a particular keyword when searching for it on Google. It is better to do the search on various regions like Google US, Google UK etc so that you can get an idea of the rankings there too. Trust me there are major changes in the ranks depending on various regions.

5 - Number of .gov backlinks

Just like the number of edu backlinks, gov backlinks are very difficult to get and for this reason, Google values them very much.If you can manage to get a couple of them, nothing like it.To check the number of .gov backlinks to your site, type the following in Yahoo search bar.
linkdomain:www.yourdomain.com site:.gov

There are some pretty cool free online tools and third party softwares that help you with all or part of these 5 SEO factors. I’ll be reviewing them soon as well.

Setting up a wordpress blog from your old blogger account is easy. But in order to get you good traffic and search engine results, it’s essential to do some SEO on it by tweaking it a bit. Once the SEO tweaking is done, wordpress is an excellent tool that will help you to the top on the SERP’s.All you have to worry about is writing good content and striking a good keyword density on the articles. Here’s a video tutorial by Garry Egan on some basic SEO tweaking on your wordpress blog.