Best theme for SEO in Drupal 6?
alliax - June 25, 2008 - 01:19
Hello, this is a discussion about seo and themes...
What are your thoughts on the theme most likely to produce the best SEO results when implemented on a new site?
I managed good results with some of the default php template themes such as garland but i'm thinking maybe some themes like zen, framework or beginningW2 which are bare bones themes could produce better results.
What is your experience with SEO and themes? Do you find that some themes works better than other? Which ones?
Your content plays a much
Your content plays a much bigger role in SEO than the theme you're using.
If you're really concerned about the code, you can customize the theme yourself to suit your needs.
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Yuriy Babenko
www.yubastudios.com
The amount of html tags, the
The amount of html tags, the placement of the core content, the default headings, all plays a part.
So which themes give that extra edge for the same content?
The amount of tags cannot
The amount of tags cannot possibly be taken into account for SEO purposes.
The placement of the "core" content is also a very grey area.
There's no such thing as a "default" heading. Blocks have headings, nodes have headings, but these are content and not some arbitrary (default) filler, even if they were entered by the developer(s) of the content as "default" text.
If you really want excellent SEO code you will have to write it yourself for your particular site and needs. I can assure you that no one theme will give a noticeable "extra edge" over another.
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Yuriy Babenko
www.yubastudios.com
Take for instance the H1 and
Take for instance the H1 and H2 tags, as you'll notice in most theme, the site title is in H1 and then the page title is H2. That's fine for the front page, but for inside page, on content nodes, it's better to put the focus on the page title, because the name of the site comes second in the importance. People who look for something on google will search for a product, not for the name of a shop they don't know. So if you have a page about a product and you optimised the page title, it would be nice to have it in H1 instead of H2.
Also, you know the order of things in the html code, like the menu on the left, that's what googlebot will read first, wouldn't it be better that he reads the real unique content of the page first? some themes use css positionning in order to put the left and right menu sidebars AFTER the content while other themes don't care about that and put the left menu sidebar BEFORE the content and the right menu sidebar after.
At last, in node.tpl.php when you output the taxonomy, wouldn't it be good if those were between STRONG tags? I don't know.
Of course SEO is very unknown especially to newbies who have a lot of things to learn and no real base, so perhaps a professional SEO who have made drupal themes will optimise it so that after when he puts content in, at least he knows his template doesn't have obvious seo mistakes in it.
Anyway, I see the topic isn't really popular on drupal forum, so I guess any theme will do!
We are interested.
Its not that the topic is not popular, its that most of the guys who reply are so full of themselves with supposed drupal wizardry that they forget that for a large number of us, the reason we like drupal is so we do not have to (or have no idea how) code html or css ever.
Thats the reason you always get in reply to your query anwers like "Go code your theme"...
How presumptuous.
But there are some really helpful people only tracing them is what is hard.
I'm also looking for a rating on SEO optimized themes and I know they are there.
When I use lynx to look at my site, the difference is themes is huge and thats a fact.
I have all my site content optimized for SEO and I have a lot of content and its not forum content.
I have a pretty good ranking for the site on the Keywords but I have some sites ahead of me that I know are using plain html with a lot less content.
Lynx shows their site as having their main content way before all my javascript and menus.
Thats their advantage.
I know what I want:
A theme with sidebars on left and right but that using css only loads that for display but in the page code loads the content before the menu's and sidebars etc.
I know there is such a theme but I cannot remember which.
Looking for it now and thats why I ended up here.
Hi, This one at least showed
Hi,
This one at least showed interested in headings for page title and can have two columns on the right :
http://drupal.org/project/marinelli
I'm not sure about columns (you have to check) but I edited this theme before it has been redesigned with css only :
http://drupal.org/project/pixture_reloaded
Lastly, I haven't looked at its html code, but it would have been good if the theme from drupal's leader would be seo-aware because it looks good :
http://drupal.org/project/acquia_marina
Cheers,
James
Pixture Reloaded is content
Pixture Reloaded is content source ordered, both the sidebars are below the content.
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Pixture Reloaded
As I said, its just finding the helpful guys.
Thanks.
This would definitely make a huge difference for me especially since I still get to keep the superfish menus from my previous theme.
I'll try it out with the sidebars on the right as I see the demo sites source code still has the links first.
I may eventually have to forego the suckerfish menu I guess.
Thanks
I wouldn't worry about so
I wouldn't worry about so much to be frank.
Even if your menus are very extensive it really makes no difference since Google and co understand that those are menus and treat them as boilerplate (thus largely ignore them).
The fact is if you're not getting deep indexed you're not in the game to start with, relying on a shallow index where content source order may make a difference will win you the occasional battle, but certainly not the war. Theres just too many other factors at play and its more worthwhile concentrating on the aspects that really do make a huge difference.
I am currently pretty deep
I am currently pretty deep indexed.
I'm ranked 4th out of 36,000 for my specific keywords (Small niche)
Its just that the three guys above me are ahead of me for no other reason (I believe) than the fact that they are source ordered. I can't see anything else.
Well, that's not very true since I had about 99 (still have) duplicate meta titles that google is taking for ever to remove even though it claims to have removed them. I can still see them in the searches. These were mostly caused by an extra language that I blocked too late. Taxonomy path is also a culprit.
Anybody know exactly how long google takes to really remove urls from its search results after it says it has?
You can't expect something
@kenyan
You can't expect something built for a framework and very generalised application to live up to your highly specialised use case. Its not some pompous arrogance that drives us to tell you to roll-your-own, its by necessity.
If you haven't got the skills, hire someone, but dont flame Drupal devs for giving the only advice they can.
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