6 WordPress Template Fixes

05 Mar

Posted by admin as SEO, Tutotorial, Wordpress

If you’re anything like me, you cringe at the thought of editing your website’s template. When I’m just starting a blog (like this one), I download one of the clean, simple templates (like this one) and try to leave well enough alone.

However, there are a few things I always make sure I change, and they apply to every single WordPress template. Well, every template I’ve ever downloaded, anyway.

Each template change I make is either because it will help prevent comment/trackback spam or it will help with SEO.

Here they are, in no particular order:

Remove “Powered by WordPress” from the footer
I’d love to leave that link on every page of my blog. The WordPress team works hard to make a great product and I really want to give them the credit they deserve. Unfortunately, it’s exactly how spammers find WordPress blogs to abuse. This can be found in the footer.php file of your template.

Remove the BlogRoll
You can see that I simply changed the name of my BlogRoll to “Sites I Visit.” It’s an easy fix to remove another footprint that screams, “I’m a WordPress blog! Come spam me!” To make this change, login to your WordPress Dashboard and manage your Links.

Change the comment text
The third footprint is the good old standard, “Leave a Reply” or (even worse) “Post Comment”. If you leave this as is, you’re inviting some unwanted links on your blog. Instead, try to use some text that reflects the personality of your blog. Not only will it prevent spam, but it will add to the user experience as well. You can find this text in the comments.php file under your template’s directory.

Change the Trackback string
The last footprint that I recommend changing is the string you use as a link for your trackback URLs. As you can see, I didn’t follow my own advice on this one. I decided to leave it alone because I think it might confuse users who are legitamitely looking for the trackback URL. If I start getting too many spammy trackbacks, I’ll change the text in my template’s single.php file.

Change the H1-4 tags
I’m completely baffled why every WordPress template uses the h2 tag in the sidebar. Are the terms “Categories” and “Archives” really the second most important terms on the page? What I usually do is make the title of my blog (in this case, “WageRank”) an h2, the title of the post an h1, and the sidebar items as h3. It will take some fiddling around in your CSS file to get everything to look right, but the SEO benefits are worth it. Unfortunately, this entails changing several of your template’s php files as well as the CSS file.

Change the Permalink TITLE
There is no question among the SEO community that search engines view the TITLE tag as the most important element on the page. Why then, are the words, “Blog Archive” jammed into each one of my posts’ titles? I edit my templates so that only the posts’ titles are shown. To do this, simply change the text between the title tags in your header.php to look like:

<?php wp_title(””); ?><?php if(is_home()) {bloginfo(’name’);} ?>

This will show your blog’s title only on your homepage and show your post’s title everywhere else.

Those are the six WordPress template changes that I make whenever I start a new blog.

Are there any others you would recommend?

http://www.wagerank.com/2006/6-wordpress-template-fixes/