I started out with a simple theme that I adapted from the Cutline theme, this was great to SEO this blog to #1 for the main keyword.

But I seemed to be getting comments along the lines of “nice simple blog”! It got me thinking that visitors expect something a bit more designer-looking, so I decided to change the theme.

So this it is.

But I had to do some vital SEO tweaks to get rid of things such as:

• Full posts showing up on archive/category pages
• The title bar having my website title pre-fixing every single post page title
• The header having an H1 anchored link of my site title on every page

For the archive.php page I replaced the code that displays the whole post content with code to display an excerpt.

The bit of code that replaces the post content insertion is:

You can look up how to do this on the WordPress Docs site.

For the title bar, I add code to the header.php file along the lines of:

You can do the editing in the admin area under appearance -> theme -> editor

And on the index.php page, remove the link around the H1 tagged title and adjust the CSS so that the text still looks the same.

And on single pages, remove the H1 tags but retain the anchor HTML so that the keyword links remain to the home page, but the H1 tags are not there to divert relevancy from the post title. Again, you will need to adjust the CSS to restore the look of the header title text.

I think that directly modifying a template for SEO is better than trying to crowbar it into shape using a plugin. But I may be wrong. Share your thoughts in the comments …

Also mention in the comments if you would like to get free SEO feedback on your site that you linked to from your name. Then I or other readers can critique your site for SEO if we have time. Don’t spam your link in the comment body!

p.s. I have enabled do-follow links for the comments here.