SEO WordPress Sandbox Theme

The SEO Wordpress Sandbox Theme is a bare naked WordPress theme ready for styling via CSS. The theme has been search engine optimised and the markup enhanced to help with search engine rankings.

I've used the Yahoo CSS grids framework which, to quote Yahoo, gives you.

The foundational YUI Grids CSS file offers three preset page widths, seven core templates, and the ability to nest subdivided regions of one to four columns. All told, the file offers almost 200 preset layouts and an unlimited number of custom permutations that work across all A-grade browsers, all for less than 2.5kb of minimized file weight.

Search Engine Optimisation

The standard themes that come with Wordpress are good. However, I like to add a couple of tweaks that I believe increase the pages rankings. Namely :-

  • Place the keywords at the beginning of <title> elements.
  • Promote titles from H2 to H1 elements.
  • A recents posts list in the sidebar, users landing on your old pages get an easy link to more recent content.

I make a couple of tweeks via the wordpress administration console.

  • From the Options/Permalinks menu set the custom structure to /%postname%/. This will place the blog entry title into the URL of the entry.
  • Install the Sidebar Widgets Plugin this will allow you to add "Latest Comments" and "Latest Posts" sections on your blog. Invaluable for getting both users and search engines to find your content.

Styling and the YUI Grid CSS

The theme comes pre-loaded with the Yahoo reset-fonts-grids-min.css file, and the HTML is marked up using the hd, bd, ft id's as specified in the grid documentation.

To use the doc0-3 and yui-t1-7 ids and classes you'll need to modify the functions.php file which can be accessed via the theme editor within wordpress. There is a cheat sheet on how to apply the various layouts and how best to use fonts.

Search engines and canonical URLs

One further change that I make to a Wordpress install is the .htaccess file. I add the following directive so that accesses to yoursite.com are forwarded to www.yoursite.com or vice versa. See the advice on URL canonicalization for why.

To make sure URL's have a leading www use.

  1. RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www[NC]
  2. RewriteRule (.*) http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [L,R=301][NC]

Or, if you prefer to strip off the leading www use.

  1. RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} \.([a-z-]+\.[a-z]{2,6})$ [NC]
  2. RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ http://%1/$1      [R=permanent,L]

Download SEO WordPress Sandbox Theme

The theme can be downloaded Here (.zip).
Posted on Wednesday, Nov 29, 2006