How to optimize wordpress template?

Before I start explaining about how to optimize wordpress template, let me talk about wordpress (for benefit of everyone). Wordpress is one of the best, if not the best free blog hosting and management site. In other words, it is among top 3 content management systems (CMS) available online. In this tutorial I'll be explaining the tricks to improve SEO of your wordpress site/blog. Even though wordpress has good content management system, it doesn't hurt doing a little bit of optimization.

Optimizing your site template will help you attract (gain) visitors and subscribers, improve your webpage rankings and have better site with great experience for visitor of the site. This tutorial might help you overcome new penguin update (by google) as well. You might need to install/use Ultimate SEO or All in One SEO plugin for your wordpress site, while trying to optimize your site template. Minimal prerequisite for understanding and implementing the tricks shown here is that user knows wordpress template structure, html5 and css3.

Here are few steps which you might find handy to optimize template for your wordpress site,

• Use Proper Headings: It is one of the basic trick. Most wordpress templates already has right settings. What do I mean by right settings?
  
  1. The post title should be enclosed in <h1> tag.
     
  2. On Homepage your site name or blog title should be in <h1>.
     
  3. Blog title shouldn't have more than <h3> tag when user is viewing/reading a particular blog post or a specific page.
     
  4. Sidebar of template should have text enclosed in <h4> or <h5>, but not in <h3> or higher !
     

Now next question would be, How do I set these settings? It is simple too. Just follow following steps,

• Look for post.php and page.php in template section of wordpress.
  
• Edit settings as mentioned above in these two pages.
  

• Use Breadcrumbs: Breadcrumbs are links, which shows the path of the blog post or the page you are looking at. This site has breadcrumbtoo, look at following image,
  
  Breadcrumbs allows users to navigate conveniently and helps crawlers to crawl your site/blog faster. You can use breadcrumb plugin, if you don't want to edit template manually. For more info on breadcrumbs, please visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breadcrumb_(navigation)
  
• Concentrate on Page Load speed: Page load time is one of the most important factor for success of a site. If a site loads slower (high page load time), it is penalized by most search engines and users hate slow loading site. You need to follow steps given below to decrease page load time,
  
  
  • Clean you code. It means try not to use inline javascript or css. Always use external javascript and css files. It will help you in maintaining your code. Also, if you are linking to external files, it is possible that user might have these files already in there cache/temp folder (when they visite your site for the first time). It means you are saving users bandwidth !
    
  • Minimize DB Calls. You can do this by making use static text/images whenever required. For example, footer text and images doesn't change in general, so you can use static text/images, rather than trying to load it dynamically by retrieving data from DB.
    
  • Use SEO Plugins. MaxCDN and W3 Total Cache are the best plugins available to make your blog load astonishingly faster ! It does it by optimizing the code based on bandwidth and using cache of client system.
    
  
  
• Optimal usage of SideBar: Most bloggers/webmasters use sidebar for helping friends or exchanging blogroll. They show links on every post/page. I would suggest, instead of doing showing links on every page show blogroll only on homepage. It has 2 advantages, one visitor will have more reading space and another is all the links in blogroll might not have links relevant with blog post ! So, it will be useless to show links which aren't related to post.
  
• Use HTML sitemaps: Sitemap is table of content for a site. It helps crawlers and visitors to navigate site easily. When you create sitemap for your site, it means you are helping yourself and crawler to crawl site faster.
  
  
  The tricks mentioned here are mostly technical. It will definitely help you in improving your site ranking, but with this optimization you need great content to be on top ! Hope this tutorial was useful. I'll comeback with more tutorials and updates in future. So, keep looking for new threads by me ;).