Does Theme Matter For SEO?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

If you have a blog or a CMS and you are concerned about search engine optimization, and you should be, then it bears restating that your theme is as essential to your SEO as any other aspect of your content. It matters for the same reason that your web design matters for SEO when you design a site using HTML. Because the code is vitally important to crawlability issues.

One reason is because code-to-text ratios determine how quickly the search engines can crawl your content and find the information they need to rank your site. Too much code and the search engines may not find enough meat in your content to rank at all. Plus, code can slow down your site and if your website is slow to load that could affect your rankings too. Too much code and the wrong kind of code.

Beyond the code-to-text issue, however, there are other issues at stake like site navigation issues and internal link structure. Some CMSs just make your internal linking structure a nightmare, or they provide you with permalinks that are not so search engine friendly. You’ll have to go through the steps to make those permalinks work on your behalf and for your good.