Using Themes and Extensions for Building Links.

Themes: Templates that you can use to create your website or blog pages.

Extensions: Plug-in programs that you can attach to your Web browser or other application to add some functionality to the application.

SEO: Search engine optimization of your web pages and website, making it easy for search engines to find your content and understand what the content is about.

There are hundreds of themes and extensions around and it would not be possible to cover them in a short article. So we look at WordPress themes and a Firefox extension to see the SEO issues involved.

WordPress Themes

WordPress themes help you format your WordPress blog. Numerous themes developed by third party developers are offered by WordPress. The themes are PHP files that you can modify if you know PHP (or can take the trouble to go through WordPress tutorials and follow instructions).

WordPress lists the following features that make for search engine friendliness:

• A page structure that puts the content at the top, and pushes sidebar and footer codes to the bottom. As a result search engines will notice your content first instead of a lot of incidental code.
• nks that create apparently static URLs for each of your blog posts. (Dynamic URLs generated from databases are not very search engine friendly.)
• Blogrolls that link to other blogs from your blog. These can add value to your own blog. If your blog is included in a blogroll somewhere else, it creates a backlink for you,
• Pings that notify blog directories that you have updated the blog
• Trackbacks that create two-way links with other blogs

SEO-friendly themes will utilize these facilities. Many themes, however, go for fancy tricks and eliminate several of these. WordPress Themes and SEO lists six SEO problems with WordPress themes, including:

• Excessive use of header tags (h1, h2) thus diluting their value
• Weak use of the title tag which should ideally be keyword rich
• Putting incidentals like sidebars above the content in the code
• Possible duplication of content in archive and categories pages

The post author suggests using All-in-One SEO Pack for search engine optimization of your WordPress blog posts. There are many other third party plug-ins for WordPress that help you improve title tags, add meta tags and so on thus enhancing the optimization of your blog.

WordPress offers a tutorial, SEO for WordPress that includes excellent SEO advice.

Firefox Extensions

SEO for Firefox is a plug-in for the Firefox browser that helps you monitor the search engine optimization features of websites that you surf. For example, you can check the current website's

• Google Page rank
• Age
• No of backlinks
• No of .edu backlinks
• No of .gov backlinks

By observing these, you will be able to develop a good idea of the factors that help search engine success. Try it when you are researching a particular market to get competitive information. (Keeping it constantly ON is not recommended as it can create bandwidth problems for search engines.)

Themes and extensions can thus be tools for SEO. Themes can also be a hindrance for effective SEO if they are poorly designed for that purpose.