How Much Does Your Theme Affect Your Search Engine Rank?

Are all themes equal?

The obvious answer here is: no; not all themes are equal. You have optional sidebars, headers, footers, carousels, featured images, compatible widgets, etc. And that's just on the front-end (what a visitor sees). As you tweak your website using your theme settings, each theme will vary in terms of how you configure your website. There are differences on the back-end as well.

But there's more!

But I have more questions. I'm wondering if there is even more to the theme than I was considering at first. As I become more aware of how to manage SEO, I've learned some key points. I'd like to highlight just a couple here:

• Header tags - there should only be one H1 tag per page
• Duplicate web content - your page should be unique on the internet
• Duplicate site content - your pages should each contain unique content
  • Pro tip - use an screen capture image to display the same text on each page if you would like to duplicate text on more than one page
• Meta Tags - these should be optimized for your keyword group

I didn't realize at first how much these few tips affected search engine rank, but I've noticed some well-optimized pages with little, and low-quality content ranking better than I expected.

Some of this may be due to simply a low volume of competing pages, but now I know to put at least a little effort into SEO optimization even before I understand enough to implement it fully. With great content, and just a little bit of effort for SEO, I'm hoping to speed up the ranking process a little bit.

Questions:

What themes (or add-ons) do you use to manage SEO on your site?

What tools would you recommend to evaluate you SEO?

What are some steps you always take to get your SEO of to a good start?

I have located some resources here at WA that I thought I would share in case anybody else is looking for more information. I'll list a few in a comment. Please feel free to do the same.

Enjoy!