How to Optimize Templates in wordpress?

As we continue with our services about WordPress SEO ongoing Tutorial Series. I hope that You all are now aware of Basic WordPress SEO as we talked previous Blog. Now I am going to discuss with some points about Template Optimization.

1)Breadcrumbs
Breadcrumbs are the links, That usually above the title post , and it shows like “Home > Articles > WordPress SEO”. The benefits of Breadcrumbs are they allow users to easily navigate your site and also search engines to determine the structure of your site more easily. These breadcrumbs should link back to the homepage and the category the post is in. You can find the Settings -> Internal Links Settings Page.

2)Headings
Most important thing you need to aware of in Template is Title. You need to make sure your post Title is <h1>. Your Blog’s name should only be an <h1> on your front page, On single post and category page also. One more thing Your sidebar shouldn’t be with <h2> and <h3> tag. These are very easy to edit in the post .php and page .php templates.

3) Clean up your code
In wordpress you have java script and CSS in your template files , You just need to your template clean. As they are not doing your wordpress SEO and Good. This is for sure that your user can cache those files with first load and search engines also don’t take so much time for loading.

4)Aim for speed
You just need to focus on your wordpress blog speed because it is very important that how many pages a search engine will spider on your blog each day.

Optimize the template to first as small amount of database as necessary. AS you can get knowledge through Speeding up wordpress.

Install a Caching Plugin. There are so many plugins that you can found through search engines which are very useful for increasing speed.

Also, Be aware of while you choosing a hosting package. It will really important for you if you want your Blog sustain with high loads.

5)Rethink that sidebar
In wordpress you probably get the widgets options, from where you just need to add the widgets on the homepage and others that you had only want on Sub pages. You can also do some changes from inside wordpress, But it’s good that if you add two sidebars , one on the homepage and one on the sub pages or write specific plugins.

6)HTML Sitemaps
There are two types of Sitemaps that you can make. One is XML Sitemap and the other is HTML Sitemap. Sitemaps helps search engine bots finding each page on your site. The reason why you should have a XML Sitemap is puts the frequency and importance to each page. So , that will be easy for search engine what to visit and which page is more important.

For XmL sitemap , You just need to download the Plugin called Google XML sitemaps.

For HTML sitemap , You need to download the plugin called HTML page sitemap.

7)Author highlighting
If you have found my site through a search you might have seen the result with author image.

This is called “ author highlighting”. It is as simple as you just need to do rel=”author” and rel=”me” code in wordpress.

These are the points about Template optimization. Now ,it is easy for you to build your blog’s Template in wordpress. In the next series we will going to be discuss Advanced WordPress SEO & Duplicate content.