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It is something that I didn’t initially consider when I was contemplating a new web design for DragonBlogger.com and selecting a WordPress theme that matched the visual appeal and functionality I was looking for.
But when a recent website SEO review tool flagged me as having too many internal links from homepage, I sought to figure out why there were so many links and what was causing hundreds of internal links just from the homepage.
So after realizing what my theme was doing, I then figured out I had a challenge to solve to try and reduce those links.
So not only does my menu bar links pass links, but I found that in each of my article summaries I was getting a link from the calendar, 2 links with the Full Story and … link, a link for the author, link for the full URL and link for the comments. This means when I had 12 stories on homepage, it was 70 links just to have 14 summary stories. Which is far to many, I went to my theme options and trimmed out links for as much as the theme would allow.
I really wish it defaulted to NoFollow most of the links except for just the one Full Story link, but that isn’t functionality built into the Suffusion framework.
So the heavy internal linking isn’t something ideal, another thing I needed to improve is the content to HTML ratio, as my summaries are small there is a lot of html tags compared to content and the ratio is out of balance according to an SEO check, this could be resolved by making longer content summaries on the homepage which I am going to play around with until I find the ideal number without affecting cosmetics too much.
So even if you are using a CMS system like WordPress and just getting a WordPress theme, there is so many web design decisions you have to look at and consider, this isn’t just the visual appearance related ones either, or even the functionality. The guts of the theme may be doing some things that aren’t ideal for SEO reasons, or things you don’t realize so you have to consider the elements behind the scenes too when you are looking at a web design change for your WordPress site.
I will be tweaking this one as much as possible, but ultimately I may end up using a Genesis framework in the future.
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