Is your blog theme keeping readers away?
I’m not just talking about how your blog looks. The actual code behind the design has a much bigger impact on your online success than you might guess.
Wendy of eMoms at Home did a great writeup on ProBlogger yesterday where she talked about the importance of a well-coded blog template and described the phenomenal results she saw when I implemented a much better coded them for her (the number of people that Google sent her doubled the next day). Wendy explored the reasons for that and the result was the ProBlogger post.
I want to go into a little more background here so that you’ll understand why the theme change made such a huge difference. Most people choose a blog theme based strictly on how it looks (and that’s definitely a valid concern, since it’s setting the tone for your blog) but aren’t aware that the behind-the-scenes details of the code can drastically affect the way the search engines “feel” about your blog.
A brief history of blog themes
Way back in the early days of blogging 
most blog themes were created using the popular code technology of the day: HTML tables. Tables were a nifty way of coding that allowed designers far more control over where things showed up on the web page than we’d ever had before. Designers loved tables, and in 2000 or so, they were everywhere.
But lo, times (and technologies) change. Since that time, HTML tables have gone way out of fashion, and this isn’t just an arbitrary shift. When it comes right down to it, HTML tables were never really intended to be used for laying out a design, and they weren’t very efficient. Along came a new technology called Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) that really was intended for positioning designs, and worked much better.
Beyond the fact that CSS was created just for this task, it had some profound effects on the way HTML code is written. It dramatically reduced the amount of “extra” code that’s needed to put things in the right spot, which in turn made it much easier for the search engines to sort through the code and find the meaningful pieces of content. It also helped the search engines identify the important pieces, like titles and headlines.
Because the new code is easier for the search engines to use, sites (and blogs) that use this new code are at a real advantage over sites that use the old code. The technology keeps improving, and now it’s possible to effectively “tell” the search engines what parts of a given page are most important—and the search engines “listen.” A site that uses the new code to the fullest naturally sees much better results.
Enough theory! Let’s get practical.
So what can you do if you have a theme that’s working against you? And more critically, how can you tell if you have a theme that’s working against you? Well, it’s a little tricky, because most people find all code to be equally indecipherable, and kind of like it that way.
One tool you can use is the W3C Validator. This tool lets you put in your blog address and test to see if the code in your theme is “legal” code (meaning it follows the rules). You’ll see either a “Valid” message or the number of errors that are standing in your way. It won’t tell you if it’s using the newest code, but the chances are very good that if your blog is declared “Valid”, you’re on the right track.
Don’t panic if you have a few errors… say, less than 15. A few errors tend to come in just from really common mistakes that often have nothing to do with the theme itself (for instance, if you forget to end a link in a post). If you have more than just a few errors, though, it’s likely that your theme is pretty flawed.
What to do?
If you have reason to believe that your theme is a problem, what should you do?
If you’re a business and even remotely serious about your blog (or website), you should seek professional help. A professional developer can whip your existing theme into shape or create a new one that’s well designed both in terms of look and code. It doesn’t cost much in the overall budget of a business, and it will play a big part in the overall success of your blog or site.
But what if you’re an individual? Most people can’t afford to pay much for a hobby, so if you’re in that category, what you want is a well-designed free theme. This can take some trial and error. (You literally have to try adding the new theme, run it through the Validator, and see how it does. Rinse. Repeat.) You’ll be off to a great start, though, if you look for themes that say they were built using the Cutline theme or Sandbox. Those are two kind of “base themes” that are very well designed, code-wise, and provide a great starting point for other designers.
If there is interest (say so in the comments!), I’ll also be glad to do a list of really well-written free WordPress blog themes.
This entry was posted on Thursday, April 12th, 2007 at 9:29 am by Sarah Lewis and is filed under Code, Design & Themes, Tips. It's also tagged blogging, cascading style sheets, Design, Design & Themes, designers, errors, HTML, phenomenal results, search engines, web page, WordPress. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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A really interesting post! I blog over at wordpress.com and tested the theme I use. It got just a few errors so I assume I am on the safe side.
Bengt
Hey,
This was a good post with a lot of interesting information. I also blog with wordpress but I work at a web design firm and we pretty W3c everything, so that helps me very little but otherwise great. Thanks
Hmmm 26 errors! I’ll have to investigate – I never would have thought about it.
Great post thanks!
Sarah, I plan to do a more in-depth post on a new version of Sandbox I’ve built that integrates the YUI css (reset/fonts/grid), as I’ve explained in the past. I’ve basically dumped the CSS from Sandbox, retained the HTML and used YUI for the CSS, since it rocks. To me this is a best-of-both-worlds scenario. More to come
Took a while but I have keep all the layout options Sandbox has, but this time done with YUI.
This is a good idea. What about Brian Gardner’s Drop Shadow theme, as used on my own blog?
Alister—I’m looking forward to your post. I’ve been hoping you’d give details ever since I saw your post talking about using YUI for your new design.
Armen—I’d say the Dropshadow theme is “fair to middling” based on a quick look at the Validator and the code. Could definitely be improved but probably isn’t hurting you a ton. It’s not really old-style code, it just is a bit messy.
Another good idea is to look for templates that other bloggers say are well designed.
If you’re subscribed to comments on this post but not to the RSS feed (horrors!), you might be interested to know that I’ve posted a follow up (also the beginning of a series) called Five free, beautiful WordPress themes to help your SEO.
If you were looking at the theme validation through my blog then most of the issues have probably been created by me. I’ve just adopted it yesterday, and I’ve been tweaking and working at it, but I need to go back over the code I’ve put in to tidy it up.
Thanks heaps for more details about this, as I read Darrens post on Problogger.com and was keen to know the whats, whys and hows!
What I’d like to know is, if you have tweaked and hacked your existing (er blogger default) template with all kinds of widgets and external extra code bits (eg from Technorati, Google Analytics etc), and you want to change your template, what is the way to go about it without losing all your extra bits? If you know what I mean!
Does one have to simply re-add all those bits once the new template has been installed?
Thanks to anyone who can do an instructional post on this! Please contact me if you do, or let me know where I can find an existing helpful resource! Thanks so much.
Cheers,
Annie
www.auctiondesign.blogspot.com
Very helpful insight. This topic hasn’t really been touched on in many blogs but you’ve done a good job on getting the word around.
OK, here is my problem…
Most of the “errors” appear to be completely irrelevant.
For example:
“element “embed” undefined”
This is in the YouTube embed scripts that I post.
Another Example:
“duplicate specification of attribute “alt”"
The error is referring to this.
alt=”Left” alt=”Digg Widget”
These make up half of my errors. Why would I stop doing this?
Annie—it depends on your blogging system quite a bit. With Blogger, yes, if you switch your design, you’ll have to re-enter everything.
With WordPress or TypePad, that’s usually not the case, because they both have a way to reuse pieces of code (WordPress calls them Widgets; TypePad has TypeLists).
Hi, Eric—the Validator is a mixed blessing. It can give you a general idea of the overall quality of coding, and if you’re a code nerd (like me), it can make it easier to catch mistakes.
That said, it’s not always practical (and doesn’t always make a big difference) to eliminate all errors. In the cases you gave, I probably wouldn’t worry overmuch about the embed error (these are pretty common with embedding videos using the provided code and don’t seem to make a notable difference to the search engines).
That said, I’d fix the double alt attributes right away, because the search engines do place value on the content of alt attributes, and having two in one tag is likely to confuse things. You’re basically missing out on an opportunity to tell Google what you’re all about.
Bottom line, the Validator isn’t a be-all, end-all kind of check… it’s just an indicator of general attention to code detail.
I just realize that I’d completely forgotten about an extremely useful tool that can give you a decent idea of the SEO-friendliness of your theme: Sitening’s free SEO Tools, specifically the SEO Analyzer.
You sign up for a free account and then you can run the Analyzer and it will give you a score and some basic assessments of what you can do to move your score upwards.
I might write a full article on the SEO Tools sometime soon, but wanted to share this info right away.
Sarah – what about the duplicate pages generated in WP, like category and archive pages – do you think it’s important to get them “unindexed”? I’ve read about that in one or two blogs and now I’m using the All-in-one SEO plugin which puts the nofollow on such pages. Still I have the impression it’s not that big a deal… What do you think?
Hi, Ana—I know there are a couple of plugins out there that take care of this. I tend to think it’s a relatively minor issue, but I’m experimenting with one of the plugins now to see what difference it makes. It can’t hurt and it might help…