How were you doing with the first part of the wordpress theme SEO? I hope that it helps you with your effort in optimize your wordpress theme to be search engine friendly. I had to admit that it might not cover all types of theme or settings but hope to help you understand what is important in wordpress theme SEO. Let us get on to the second part.

This optimization is based on this template: Super Adsense Theme

Duplicate Contents

I’m no sure if you realized that Wordpress creates a lot of duplicate content for your blog. Especially when you are having tags (using Ultimate Tag Warrior Plugin), recent comments, archives, categories and etc. Search engines doesn’t like duplicate contents very much. This is bad for your blog’s SEO. To help solve duplicate contents problems, insert the following between the <header> tags:

<?php
if((is_home() && ($paged < 2 )) || is_single() || is_page() || is_category()){
echo '<meta name="robots" content="index,follow" />';
} else {
echo '<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" />';} ?>

This way, it’ll only tell search engines to index only the homepage, pages, and single pages. Everything else will be set to noindex.

Page Titles

First of all in the second part, we SEO the page titles. Go to header.php to replace the codes in the <title> tag with:

<title>
<?php wp_title(' '); ?>
<?php if(wp_title(' ', false)) { echo ' | '; } ?>
<?php bloginfo('description'); ?> @ <?php bloginfo('name'); ?>
</title>

This essentially will display your blog’s name as the Title for the home page and it will use the title of the blog post or page for the Title. Well if you are using plugin such All in One SEO Pack or HeadSpace2, you could do without modifying the Title tag.

These two tweaking of your wordpress theme would make your theme more search engine friendly. Hope that helps. Will cover more SEO methods in the future.