WordPress as the best blogging and CMS used by millions of people offers thousands of themes to use for starter bloggers, who want to learn how to do everything in WordPress. But when it comes to search engine optimization best practices, free themes can destroy the whole content.
The same thing applies to premium themes that you can find anywhere online. Many theme sellers and coders claim that their premium WordPress themes are optimized for SEO and more promises. Unfortunately, the majority, if not all the people without coding and SEO knowledge will believe them and buy their products whenever they find those commercial declarations.
There are real premium and SEO-ready themes for WordPress that you can use and help your pages to rank better in Google, Bing, Yahoo, and the other search engines.
In this post, I’ll show you the top-rated and best premium SEO themes for your WordPress website. Furthermore, I’ll give you some tips to make your site better and look clean for web crawlers, and also, for people.
If you don’t have the time to understand the importance of the theme coding, and you just want themes, then, I only recommend the StudioPress premium themes. They are great designs and with real reviews and recommendations from professional designers. Also, I recommend the Template Monster themes, because I know how much time their designers spend to create powerful and fully optimized themes.
Why does WordPress need SEO-optimized themes?
I know that people just want to get a well-optimized theme, but first, let me show you why you need them and not any other themes. By default, WordPress comes with the best SEO practices and structure. But, that’s only the free gift from developers and that advantage can disappear with a poorly coded theme.
The theme creator should understand in-depth what is SEO and the WordPress codex structure and all the related things. A simple error in the header coding can harm the site ranking and cause hidden problems that only search engine crawlers can see or a developer.
That’s why having a clean header of the theme is the first step for good optimization. Then, the theme should follow the WordPress codex and arrangement in every single detail. That’s what lots of companies ignore, they just create a beautiful theme and forget the rest. So, the best SEO-friendly WordPress themes should also follow the Google webmaster guidelines.
It’s not a secret that Google offers free guides and lots of informative coding articles, to help developers understand the Google crawlers, and what they need exactly to understand web pages properly.
If you have the best WordPress theme, but with some bugs and errors, then, you are losing ranking without a doubt. That depends on the problem size and its role, but in general, every coding error, especially in the head section will impact the ranking.
Speed is one of the new ranking factors in Google. There is no excuse for creating a theme that makes pages load slowly. That’s why companies like StudioPress invest lots of work and develop strategies for the speed of the theme.
The theme coding should be clean from errors and unwanted elements. For example, if you want a theme for your blog, then, you don’t need e-commerce elements that add extra seconds to the website’s loading time and make it slower. That’s why the creation of a powerful theme framework that is flexible for adding and deleting elements, is what people want today.
The best SEO-optimized WordPress themes should be responsive, that’s what lots of people neglect in their websites. If you’re following the Google updates and news, you already noticed how much they prefer responsive themes, and that’s also an element in the ranking algorithm.
If you’re using a theme that’s not responsive, then, you’re losing some of your traffic for that reason, and no one will say that until you discover the big role of responsive design when you install one. Also, I should mention the importance of the Schema markup for any website. It’s a method that lets search engines read and understand useful data about your site, posts, events, and much more.
The old themes that use the structured data stored in the database, caused problems and denied access to web crawlers. It’s difficult for the Googlebot to access that data when it’s converted into an HTML format.
That’s why the new markup structure lets these crawlers access the details directly, and add them to the rich snippet in the search engine result page. It’s not just simple data to add, but, that will help to rank the page, based on its content first, and the data of that page. So, themes without Schema Markup support will never help these days.
Top-rated SEO WordPress themes
By following the above elements and search engine needs, I can recommend using the StudioPress themes. They are a child theme for the most advanced WordPress theme framework used by big websites such as CNN, Mashable, and many others.
These themes are the result of long and hard work by WordPress experts, and well-known developers like Brian Gardner, who is the founder of the largest WordPress theme company. The creation of the Genesis framework is one of the big events in the WordPress world. It’s not a standard way to build themes, but the perfect work that a human can create nowadays.
No one else has created such a coding art, if you open the theme files, you will find a few ones with a small size for the total theme file’s size. It’s clean work with full SEO optimization, from the code of the header and all the other files, to the speed of the theme that no other product offers.
I’ve used many of their themes, especially, the News Pro, and the Epic themes. They come with the minimum elements, but with powerful security and they follow the Google guidelines and the best SEO practices. That’s without forgetting that all these themes are fully customizable without exception. That’s why there are thousands of Genesis developers.
The theme framework creates a solid and secure structure and base to use for creating custom WordPress themes. All that comes in a small size of the file, it’s the real organized work. Google crawlers access StudioPress themes and crawl them quickly, and that’s why blogs with these themes get some boost of ranking.
It’s easy, give Google what they want and offer a fast crawling experience for their web crawlers, and you will get better results, but if you have good content, of course.
These themes are also optimized for better conversions, navigation, and user experience. With carefully selected layouts, your site will offer what people want first, then, you will make the search engine “happy” with your content structure. These are the top premium SEO WordPress themes to use for maximum search engine visibility, and faster loading time.
No matter what mobile device the user is using, from smartphones to tablets and of course desktops, the layout will be optimized, depending on the screen dimension and resolution. Best of all, they are all themes with top security settings to block injections from hacked sites that can link to your pages and want to harm your business.
I hope these themes helped and I can’t recommend any other products actually, simply, because they are the best of the best, when it comes to SEO and speed.
Tips
Installing one of the below themes that I recommend is not a hard job. However, if you use WordPress for the first time, then, make sure to read how to install themes in WordPress. At the same time, make sure to save a copy of your downloaded theme in the cloud.
You can use your Google Drive or Dropbox account for that. That’s good when you lose the file for any reason.
Please avoid installing plugins that you are not using or plugins that were created for simple jobs like adding Google analytics code. If you browse your theme settings, you will find an option for doing that. All the modern themes come with options for adding codes in the head section, and you don’t have to install plugins for that.
Also, you can customize your theme colors if you want, just browse the theme options, and if you can’t find your best color, then, you can add it manually. Learn some basic CSS codes and install the JetPack plugin from WordPress that will add a custom CSS option for any theme you want.
If you want to install one of the StudioPress themes, then, you can read this post about the best plugins for Genesis child themes. You will find lots of tools to make your own theme, even if you’re not a coder. Just use the visual editing tool and you will be able to build powerful child themes if you want extreme customization.
