Collin from FeedFlare.ca asked if your template or theme could affect your seo? It was an interesting question I don’t usually see so I thought I would try and answer.

Disclaimer: You can hurt your seo by trying to make your blog seo friendly (like changing your url structure without redirects) and I’m no expert, so take the video and advice with a grain of salt and modify at your own risk.

YES, your template can help or hurt your seo.

Get Your Content High

When you hit view->source in your browser your content should be as high as possible in the source code.

1. Many people believe that, all things equal, that a page with the content at the top of the source will rank higher than one with content at the bottom of the source.

2. By placing your content very low you increase your odds of forgetting to close a tag like a script or href tag and have a bot parse out some of your content.

Spiders Are Your Friend

Lynx is a program that tries to spider your website like a googlebot or other search bot does it. Try your site at this lynx viewer for fun.

Sites that have crazy templates, open tags, or other nonsense can make lynx viewers choke, like FeedFlare.ca was doing when I tried it.

This is real bad because google guidelines say your site should be able to be viewed by a lynx viewer.

Slow And Low

A poorly coded template can slow down your site. Not only from the obvious large picture files, but from poor design choices like putting the CSS and Javascript in the template instead of keeping them separate.

Assuming speed of the site is an seo ranking factor, your designer can hurt you with their design decisions. Here is Yahoo telling you to separate your css and javascript to increase speed.

“Link”in Logs

Back at the google guidelines they tell us pages should have less than 100 links.

Certainly you won’t get booted for having more than 100, however it could probably be thought that all things equal, a site with a few hundred links will rank less than one with one below 100 and in compliance with the webmaster guidelines.

Some designers will add 30 links of archives, 20 links of recent comments, and all other kinds of nonsense. You might be over your 100 link limit with just your template links if the designer gets carried away.

Finally

You are much better served spending your time worrying about content instead of worrying about seo. HOWEVER, if you were setting up your blog tomorrow, you might want to take some of these thoughts into consideration when picking your next template.

Can you think of any other problems a template can cause with your site ranking?