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.
- RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www[NC]
- RewriteRule (.*) http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [L,R=301][NC]
Or, if you prefer to strip off the leading www use.
- RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} \.([a-z-]+\.[a-z]{2,6})$ [NC]
- RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ http://%1/$1 [R=permanent,L]
Download SEO WordPress Sandbox Theme
The theme can be downloaded Here (.zip).
[...] current BuzzDroid.com theme, for download. The theme is built upon the fantastic framework of the SEO Sandbox Theme by Ian Purton which incoporates the "YUI" Yahoo! User Interface. The Yahoo! User [...]
Thanks for posting this. It was exactly what i was looking for. If I make any updates to it I will be sure to send them back to you for consideration for future versions.
Peace,
James
Excellent. Many thanks for sharing this. Saved me some valuable time.
I think I found a minor bug: the category template file still has an id of ‘contents’ which could be switched to ‘bd’. Everything else is working perfectly. I’m still customizing my site. Your template and the awesome powers of yahoo ui grids is making it ridiculously easy. On another note: that crazy looking car/logo at the top of the page is sweet. You drew that? I want one!
[...] YUI-Mainstream built on the framework of the YUI Grids CSS library. The theme is based upon the SEO Sandbox Theme by Ian Purton, which is a fantastic place to start for all theme developers thinking about making accessbile, [...]
Great work, I like much but I can’t be able to 100% validate CSS/XHTML just like happens in this page. Is there some way to obtain that it validates well?
[...] ready scritto da me medesimo, non esattamente from scratch, dato che sono partito dall’ottimo seo-sandbox di Ian Purton, del quale spero che possa ereditare le caratteristiche di SEO; la scelta di partire [...]
[...] on my SEO Wordpress Sanbox Theme I’ve created a minimal gray [...]
Great guide, we’ll be following this on an upcoming project.
Nice design… it’s a dead ringer for Khoi Vinh’s subtraction.com though. It would be nice to see him credited in some way.
Great post. Thanks for sharing!
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Hello Friend,
An excellent blog put together very well, interesting and very helpful, many thanks,
Great, simply great. THe perfect framework to start building your branding on top.