Wordpress theme and SEO?

Do wordpress themes play any role in better SEO?

Search engines care about content. They don’t care at all what the page looks like. If all you’re doing with a WP theme is changing the visual appearance, why would that have any effect at all on its performance in search engines?

Thanks Stevie D

The theme can have an affect if it is poorly coded, and some themes contain embedded links to non related third party sites, so just keep an eye out for these things.

I would say that this is largely incorrect. As long as without styling the page makes sense then I don’t think the code really matters.

Of course, there are small optimisations like the use of header tags and having alternative text in your images, but the effect of those is debatable.

The coding of the page can affect rankings in 2 ways:

  1. If the code is poorly structured so it prevents the search engines from crawling the page properly
  2. If there is a ton of unnecessary code towards the top which pushes the main content body farther down in the code. This may not have a large impact on rankings, but if it is pushed farther down it is possible it will have some affect.

These are 2 things you want to keep an eye on when choosing a template theme.

In optimization, themes does not play a considerable role. But for user’s standpoint themes play a major role.

A good theme with good site structure and navigation brings back visitors to your website.