Wordpress SEO content positioning

Where your content is positioned on a web page can influence the search engine performance of your blog so it pays to ensure that your Wordpess theme is designed to boost your SEO as much as possible.

We recently described how the placement of your content can assist in SEO performance. Basically, placing your valuable content as near top the top of your web page as possible, will help search engines give greater weight to web page in their search results.

Admittedly taking care with where your content resides in your page HTML is only a small consideration. The quality of your content is actually far more important, however when you are striving for all the advantages that you can muster in the competitive Internet environment, it makes sense to pay attention to the small improvments as well as the more important ones.

So how can you tell if your Wordpress theme is as fully SEO optimised with regards to content placement as it should be?

Actually its simple to do. View the source of your web site index page (by right clicking and selecting view source in the list). If the HTML that creates your columns is displayed above your content, then you know that your theme is not working as well from an SEO point of view as it could.

In this case, you need to ask your web designer, or do it yourself, to edit the main scripts in your theme and place the PHP code that displays the columns below the main content column.

This is the code to look out for:

include (TEMPLATEPATH . '/sidebar.php')

As long as your theme design doesn’t break by making this change, then you have taken one more step to ensuring that your Wordpress driven web site is as SEO friendly as possible.