Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) in HeatMap Theme
HeatMap Theme does includes a number of features to help improve the ‘indexability’ of your blog, which will hopefully give it a good chance of being deemed important by the Search Gods. I implemented a common sense approach, there’s no real tricky stuff. It’s all definitely white hat around these parts. In HeatMap Theme it’s all about using XHTML in the way it was meant to be used, so that machines can figure out what the important bits of the blog content are.
The very best thing you can do though is create brilliant content which everyone is interested in, and as a result attract quality inbound links from other sites. That’s the real trick!
HTML Title
HeatMap Theme creates HTML page titles in the following format:
Page Title – Site Tag Line – Site Name
It makes sense to put your most relevant keywords in the title of your pages, posts and categories.
HTML Headings
H1 tags are applied to the page titles of each single page and post to flag that these are the most important things to index.
On the Home page all posts have a H2 tag applied to the title, apart from the ‘Featured Page’ which has H1 applied to the title, again indicating that your featured page text is the most important thing on your home page to return in search results.
Meta Description and Meta Keywords
You can add the Meta Description and Meta Keywords to your home page directly from the HeatMap Theme options page. You can also add these to individual posts and pages through HeatMap theme custom fields.
Due to misuse of keywords by nefarious webmasters, meta keywords might be mostly ignored by search engines, but anecdotally might make a small difference if your keywords correspond to your page content. Meta Description is still important though, and text from the meta description will often be returned in search results.
Site Map
A Site Map page template is included in HeatMap Theme. Including this in your site will help search engines more easily find the links to all content on your site.
‘Read More…’ and Custom Excerpts
Some SEO experts also think that changing your ‘Read More…’ links to something more descriptive will make a difference to your site ranking. HeatMap Theme has some custom fields which will allow you to do this.
Hand creating keyword rich excerpts from your posts, as opposed to just letting WordPress display the text up to the [more] tag, is also reputed to have SEO benefits. The Post Excerpt field is implemented in HeatMap Theme, as an alternative to using the [more] shortcode, when showing posts on the Home Page, Categories, Search and Tag archives.
There are also some extra custom fields which will allow you to create alternatives to ‘Read More…’ which are used in the ‘Recent Posts Plus’ HeatMap Theme Widget.
Index / No-Index
HeatMap Theme sets the home page, individual posts and individual pages to ‘Index’ and everything else to ‘No-Index’, so that search engines will hopefully ignore pages that don’t need to be indexed. Recently it was revealed by Google that there was change to the rules regarding No-Index, so this feature may or not make a difference, but it’s in there just in case some search engines still want to know this info.
