How to Optimize Templates in wordpress?

As we continue with our services about WordPress SEO ongoing Tutorial Series. I hope that You all are now aware of Basic WordPress SEO as we talked previous Blog. Now I am going to discuss some points about Template Optimization.

1)Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs are the links, That are usually above the title post, and they show like “Home > Articles > WordPress SEO”. The benefits of Breadcrumbs are they allow users to easily navigate your site and also search engines to determine the structure of your site more easily. These breadcrumbs should link back to the homepage and the category the post is in. You can find the Settings -> Internal Links Settings Page.

2)Headings

The most important thing you need to be aware of in the Template is the Title. You need to make sure your post Title is <h1>. Your Blog’s name should only be an <h1> on your front page, On a single post, and category page. One more thing Your sidebar shouldn’t be with <h2> and <h3> tags. These are very easy to edit in the post .php and page .php templates.

3) Clean up your code
In WordPress you have Javascript and CSS in your template files, You just need to your template clean. As they are not doing your WordPress SEO and Good. This is for sure that your user can cache those files with the first load and search engines also don’t take so much time to load.

4)Aim for speed
You just need to focus on your WordPress blog speed because it is very important to how many pages a search engine will spider on your blog each day.

Optimize the template to first as small amount of database as necessary. As you can get knowledge through Speeding up WordPress.

Install a Caching Plugin. There are so many plugins that you can find through search engines which are very useful for increasing speed.

Also, Be aware of this while you choosing a hosting package. It will really important for you if you want your Blog sustained with high loads.

5)Rethink that sidebar

In WordPress, you probably get the widgets options, from where you just need to add the widgets on the homepage and others that you had only wanted on Subpages. You can also make some changes from inside WordPress, But it’s good if you add two sidebars, one on the homepage and one on the sub-pages, or write specific plugins.

6)HTML Sitemaps
There are two types of Sitemaps that you can make. One is XML Sitemap and the other is HTML Sitemap. Sitemaps help search engine bots find each page on your site. The reason why you should have an XML Sitemap is to put the frequency and importance of each page. So, that will be easy for search engines what to visit and which page is more important.

For XML sitemaps, You just need to download the Plugin called Google XML sitemaps.

For an HTML sitemap, You need to download the plugin called HTML page sitemap.

7)Author highlighting
If you have found my site through a search you might have seen the result with the author’s image.

This is called “ author highlighting”. It is as simple as you just need to do the rel=” author” and rel=” me” code in WordPress.

These are the points about Template optimization. Now, it is easy for you to build your blog’s Template in WordPress. In the next series, we will discuss Advanced WordPress SEO and duplicate content.