Today let’s review this theme from Headset Options, which is supposed to be a SEO friendly, AdSense ready wordpress theme.
Like all other AdSense ready themes, this one too focuses on text and space compatibility for AdSense. The main reasons for it’s compatibility for AdSense is that the text of the articles are in type and size similar to that of AdSense text ads. It is spaced in such a away that if an AdSense ad is placed amidst the post, it would sit in perfect camouflage in the article.
When you place the AdSense code, just make sure that the title links of the ads have the same colour as the links in the theme, and that’s light blue (#6699CC).
How SEO friendly is this Wordpress theme?
Considering the SEO factors that decide how it forms an SEO friendly theme, what stands out is the fact that it has a SEO friendly layout . If you take a look at the screenshot you’ll see that the layout of the theme is designed in such a way that the crawlers will have no trouble finding out what is the content on the site.
The titles of the posts are included in the H1 tags, and there is the proper use of other HTML tags as well making it standards compliant.
During crawling, the site layout is designed in such a way that, the heading is crawled first, then the pages, then the content with proper markup, and then the sidebar content. This in fact is a good strategy to deliver the content by importance to the search engines. Many other wordpress themes, which claim to be SEO friendly, miss this very basic feature.
One factor however, that I find missing is the <strong> attribute. If the strong attribute was CSS styled to not stand out bolded from the text, readers will not find it awkward, when you <strong> out the keywords. As of now, when you manually “strong” out the keywords, they stand apart as bolded text, so there is a limit to using keywords.
The same problem goes with the heading and titles. Wish the strong attribute was also included with the titles. It looks very plain and flimsy as of now. But this is something you can easily add by tweaking with the CSS styling.
But overall, it’s a very light weight, search engine friendly theme, that is put on steroids when using AdSense text ads. It’s so seo friendly that the only problem I see with it is that it misses the frills to impress the human eye. But if you want a theme to use for your website that is focused on making money from AdSense, targeting the search engine traffic, giving less importance to the human eye, then this is the theme for you.
Rating scores
AdSense compatibility - 8/10
Search Engine Friendliness - 8/10
Download the wordpress theme here .
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Hi Mani,
I have noticed in many of your posts that when ever you use the word Google or Adsense you link it up correspondingly. Does it add any value from the seo point of view?
I was wondering why u would link up Google/adsense and i guess no one is going to click those and it will also increase your out bound link.
Ramanujam’s last blog post..I m back! Welcome 2008!
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SE friendly, but not human friendly…?
Niyaz PK’s last blog post..Orkut getting the loops wrong
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Ram, It doesn’t add any value to the blog or may be it dilutes the link density quotient. But I’m just pointing to good resources here and I’m thinking of adding more resources that I often use like wikipedia and more relevant sources of information on some text links. It’s for no vice or beginner readers who might want to check out the resources.
Thanks for the nudge though
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The value of an SEO friendly theme cannot be underestimated…especially H Tags. Thanks for all of your valuable insight.
I might give this theme a try
Richard
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