I wanted to pick a simple theme for my beta 1 version of the site. I don’t plan on running ads at this time so I just uploaded 89 different wordpress themes to see which look would fit best with my needs. I wasn’t sure what I wanted but I did want a theme which was easy to use. Here is my step of picking the current theme.
-Have a sample site which you want your site to look like. Get some kind of idea. Ask your friends or family about the themes your about to pick and how they feel about the user interface. Simplicity is the key to a successful website. I stress this to many of my clients who wants to have splash introduction flash pages and sites that mix crammed content with flashing ads in every pixelated space of the homepage.
-Next upload a bunch of WP Themes you like via FTP (I uploaded about 89 themes). For me I have this problem where I like all designs and I’m very indecisive so I just make choices when I test out the themes. I need to get a feel and have a personal experience instead of picking a theme that’s “cool” looking.
-Log into your wordpress then preview each one and try to see which would be Search Engine Friendly. There are some themes that come SEO ready so that options was available for people who have no idea on how to optimize for search engine, but I think you can basically turn any Wordpress theme friendly. They offer variety of SEO Plugins and to customize via CSS is not as hard for novice web designers.
-I’ll pick my top 5 favorite themes and do a double take preview to pick my final one. I’ll print screen, bring it into photoshop and try to customize it with my own logo, color and type face. Having a BOLD, clean type face with the right color combination can make an effective type logo for your site. I played around a bit and thought this was catchy:
I ask my art director friend Mitch (see his work) and the first thing he said was that the logo reminded him of HBO. He knew automatically what type face and ridiculous typeface detail since he eat, lives and breath graphic design. He gave me a thumbs up on the logo and I thought it was good enough for my version 1 of my site.
-I added this logo to the header.php of my picked theme. When you add the image on the site, you have options to have the image robot from search engines to collect data on your site. If you want this logo to be viewed on the image search engines then don’t forget to add the “ALT” information for the image and to name your image so the robots can read it clearly. Example: How_to_Seo_Logo.jpg is better than IMG_2829.jpg – This is with every image on the web.
-This is what I have now.
I think the red is a bit out of place and was going to change it to the dark forest green but I like how it’s a complimentary color to the green so it pops out. The logo is subtle compared to the small red fonts even thought the logo is the biggest thing on the page.
-Adding meta data in your header like keywords and description can help you be found on search engines. I usually leave the description blank for sites that are dynamic but keywords can help you find readers for your content.
Here’s my current keyword choices:
<meta name="keywords" content="how to seo, how to seo a website, seo, search engine optimization, seo for beginners, seo help, seo advice, seo tips" />
-I also added a readers subscription service (Example of a FREE Subscription Service: Feedburner), where I can have readers sign up to my site. Basically a free service to all my posts. Offering a free e-book or product could help bring many subscribers. I don’t have anything to offer except for my knowledge at this time and for some people that’s enough but I know for a fact that offering something by signing up works! What would you give away?
-I added a couple of plugins for wordpress such as the Add to Any Plugin which gives the power to share my posts on any of the popular social networking sites. I also used WP-reCAPTCHA which is an anti-spam for your comment box. I already had one SPAM after one day, so this is a must!
Overall, I made small changes to the theme but it will probably have big effects. I still haven’t done the other important things yet like a sitemap, but I’ll get to that eventually as I’m building this site. Subscribe to me if you don’t want to miss more of what I’ll talk about or if you want to follow what I’m writing about.
Tags: picking a wordpress theme, seo advice for a website, seo tips for new websites
