How To Find An SEO-Friendly Website Template

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

If you are planning to build your website with a template you’ll have to make sure you get the right kind of template. Some templates may look pretty but are sorry SEO templates and will hurt you in the search engines.

One such template is the CGI plug-in type. It’s written in PHP, but the title of the document is taken from a CGI plug-in. Beside the security issues associated with this template, all the pages share the same title, description, and keyword meta tags. That’s bad for SEO. Ideally, your template should include separate meta tags for every page on the website. If your website has just one title, description, and meta tag then you will not be able to customize each page’s content for maximum SEO benefit with the search engines and that will hurt you in the rankings.

There is another type of website template where each page has its own filename and this will make your website more friendly toward the search engines, but this is a little illusion. While each web page has a unique filename, the entire website will share the meta tags. Again, that will limit your SEO mojo. You can create secondary files on your server and put in code to require it to look in that secondary for unique meta tags on every page. Really, though, that’s a pain in the royal arse and you’re much better off just using a simple template where all the elements are in the right place.

The Body-Only Template is the one you want. This template is written in PHP, but each individual web page is written with unique page titles, descriptions, and keyword meta tags so that you get all the SEO benefits you deserve. You can recognize this template by finding the code for the element in the body of the template rather than the head of the template. The code between the head tags tells the template to include the information on every page, but that same code written between the body tags will allow each web page of your website to be unique in all the important ways.

So be sure to use the right kind of template for your website and if you have a web designer or consultant building your website for you be sure to ask them if they are using a template that is proper for SEO. When you ask, ask them if they are using a Body-Only Include, Template As Include or a CGI argument. You want the Body-Only Include. If they don’t understand this terminology then ask them where the code for the meta tags is located. If they say it’s in the head of the template then ask for a template that includes in the body, or find another designer.