Recommended Wordpress themes for great SEO

[well-its-1-louder]

Hi there, I'm trying to decide which theme to use. My main concern is if the theme has been built using a stable framework to ensure plugin compatibility for SEO. Also a general question, does the homepage need to have a certain amount of text content for SEO, or can other pages be SEO optimised with text / keyword? Some of the nicer themes seem to have a sparce text to image ratio on the homepage. I quite like this as an initial 'welcome' but worry this isn't great for SEO. Any suggested themes / advice will be welcome. Thanks

[MattAntonino]

I've had a number of clients ask me this lately and I keep going with the same advice.  I recommend the Genesis framework (over Thesis for MANY reasons) and then I recommend making sure your layout is right.  Title/logo H1, post titles and related headings H2, subheadings H3, etc.

Check any theme demo against the WC3 validator and Pingdom and run it on one of the many on-site analysis sites, such as http://www.woorank.com/

Once you've seen a demo you like that checks out on those 3 links, Wordpress is mainly a matter of Yoast's Wordpress SEO, a sitemap plugin if you don't like Yoasts.  As far as the low text to image ratio, don't forget that most of the themes these days are customizable to let you add more text than you may see to the front page.

[theLotter]

Thesis is a good theme with built in SEO advantages.  Headway is great if you are looking for one with the most flexibility.

As Matt said, using Yoast and ensuring everything is set up important is just as important as picking a good theme (if not more)

[ChrisDyson]

I agree with Sara Thesis and Headway but I'd also recommend the Genesis Framework from Studiopress too.

As Matt stated the Yoast plugin is by far the best WordPress SEO plugin to use on your sites.

[BedeFahey]

+1 for Yoast and the comments about it being more important than the theme. I've yet to encounter compatibility issues with the plugin, and we do a lot of development work in WordPress.

Personally, I think a decent paragraph of text is good to have on the homepage. That said, if you've got sub-pages that are more appropriate to your keywords, ranking them is most likely going to yield the best long-term results, even if it takes a bit longer.

[well-its-1-louder]

Thanks everyone,

Appreciate the helpful comments and suggestions.

Matt, thanks for the reminder about comparison tools.

I'm new to Wordpress & after a some consideration opted for a Theme called 'AVADA' on Themeforest (http://themeforest.net/item/avada-responsive-multipurpose-theme/2833226). I think it looks great but I wasn't aware of the frameworks e.g. Genesis which Yoast mentions on his blog.

I've added Yoast SEO but the traffic lights don't all seem to work, e.g. content doesn't contain keywords, when the content clearly does. I thought this could be due to a conflict with AVADA not being on the Genesis et al frameworks, but I'm guessing here. There seems to be a general problem with Yoast not accurately displaying the results - anyone else find this and is there any suggestions?

I'm easing over to the Genesis framework to avoid issues. Bede you mention you don't get compatibility problems, ever used Themeforest or Themes outside of these frameworks?

Thanks again...

[MattAntonino]

Actually, I just finished a website design using Avada theme - strange coincidence!  I just logged into the backend and the traffic lights are working fine.  Have you used Yoast before?  Avada works fine with Yoast - I just this minute confirmed that.  PM me if you have difficulty but if you're entering your post, focus keyword, etc. then hitting Enter on the focus keyword, it should show.  I just got a 'traffic light' green though, so it works.

[c2g]

Hi,

Old thread, but wondering if you're able to generate an XML sitemap through Yoast with your Avada theme. There's an open thread on the Theme Fusion forum about the Yoast sitemap returning a 404 error. Just tried and I'm getting the same thing. Wondering if you came up with a workaround.

Thanks