What makes a wordpress theme SEO-friendly?

[jac_lar]

Hi,

I'm just starting to look into creating my own website, for the first time, and have been looking around on various wordpress themes for it. I then came across an article stating that some themes are more optimised for SEO purposes than others.
Since I am a noob to the field of maintaining a website, but how important the SEO factor of it all is, I would of course prefer a theme that makes thing as easy as possible for me once I get it up and running.

So what actually makes a wordpress themes SEO friendly and what are the key elements I should look for/be aware of when choosing one?

I really appreciate all advice I can get.

Thanks in advance!

[martinibuster]

Some companies that create themes consider putting no-follows on links an SEO feature. That's a fairly useless feature and fortunately that's often the extent of a theme's SEO friendliness.

In a way, a theme that makes little to no effort to be SEO friendly might be a good place to start. The best a theme can do is to be lightweight in code and images so that it downloads quickly. A theme with the bare minimum of features that can also look great is what's best.

Most if not all themes can be hacked to be whatever you want it to be. But here are the features you should be looking for

1. Small image sizes
2. Fast download, which means not a lot of code (unnecessary bells and whistles)
3. Easy to read
4. Layout makes it easy for visitors to browse

The SEO friendly part of it is what you do with it, like making the page names short and with a sensible naming convention that does not use multiple hyphens. Other things are sizes of fonts, removal of page elements that distract. Basically you want to make it a good user experience. None of these things are a part of a theme's native SEO friendliness.

The Yoast SEO plugin is useful except for the part that reports on your keywords. That's outdated and irrelevant and should be revised to make it up to date.

[ergophobe]

One thing that WP does is have a lot of small resources - every plugin has its own CSS and Javascript, for example - and WP has no built-in aggregation (like Drupal, for example).

So...
1. think hard about whether you need a plugin
2. If you have a lot of files, looking into an aggregator plugin - a plugin to solve the problem of too much cruft from plugins. Ironic, I know.

>>avoid multiple hyphens

Or how about this: always craft a custom "slug" and keep it short. Personally, for URLs on Wordpress, I usually get rid of the date string, but am not as diligent about keeping them short as I should be.

[martinibuster]

Some plugins are unnecessary since some of what they do can be hard coded into the template itself, ideally a child theme. For example, if you want to set certain things in the head section, like language and whatnot, rather than do a php call just hard code it in there.

I've been experimenting with some functionality to increase engagement. Too soon to draw conclusions though.