Is your pretty, lil blog theme hindering or helping your site?

I am not a creative person. In fact, I am very lazy in Photoshop-ing because the program slows down my Mac and I couldn’t be bothered with beautiful banners or blog themes.

As a WordPress user, all I need is to find some free blog theme and get working. I rarely hire people to make banners or design any personalised blog theme. I change blog template faster than most bloggers because I get bored with a theme really fast.

To me, all I care is –

1) Is the theme fast to load?
2) Does it mess up when surfed on mobile?
3) Is the banner taking up too much valuable real property which I could stuff banners?
4) Is anyone using the same theme as I am, in the neighbourhood?

and finally, the two most important things are

– Is it good for making money with Google Adsense?

– Is it SEO friendly?

Now, I am going to share just one very important opinion. I may be wrong or I could be right. A lot of bloggers tend to look for unique, personalised blog theme and they like those magazines type.

A magazine type of blog theme is one which has the latest post on the top and then, in columns, the excerpt of the previous posts.

I will tell you why this is a bad idea, in my opinion.

We blog for search engines, not appearances. If you go for appearances, you are going to impress only a few regular visitors. Regular visitors do not help you to make money.

I find that if I have about 5-7 FULL posts on the main page, Google and Yahoo will index some random keywords in amongst those seas of words in the 5-7 posts.

So, if you put all excerpts to your previous posts on the front page, you are not offering important keywords to the search spiders because the spiders do not care if you have gold dusts on your theme. Search engine spiders look for keywords and take those keywords back to Google and these keywords will appear on the search results.

In a gist, if you have a blog and wish to get better search rankings, do not offer dim sums to those spiders. They nibble and get back hungry. Give them a full meal, from appetizers to desserts so that they go back to Google (or yahoo) and vomit out all those keywords to be indexed.

Well, like I said, I could be wrong. Who knows, I am just being a sour grape because I am too lazy to bother with pretty blog themes.

Post Author: lilian

4 thoughts on “Is your pretty, lil blog theme hindering or helping your site?

    Calvin Ngan

    (January 10, 2009 - 4:31 am)

    well, you can’t just blog for search engine, one needs to find the right balance between design and being SEO friendly. If you blog is messy, unimpressive and confusing, you’re not likely to convert that anonymous guy that came from X search engine.

    it doesn’t matter if your post made it to the frontpage, sitemap takes care of everything. Try posting an article and back date it before you hit the publish button, then search for the url in Google after a day or two, maybe three – depending a few factors, you’ll be amazed that Google crawled that hidden post.

    lilian

    (January 10, 2009 - 11:42 am)

    calvin – Who says anything about messy, unimpressive and confusing blog themes ah? Sitemap takes the post to the permalinks. I am talking about the index page lah. Read properly lah, don’t confused my readers.

    new home guide

    (January 12, 2009 - 1:26 am)

    Well it is helping so far:)

    Jean

    (May 30, 2009 - 9:12 pm)

    lilian, for a housewife, you are impressive with your net savvy skills. I cannot look down on being a housewife anymore…

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