A good and well structured WordPress theme is one that loads the contents first. Maybe I should re-phrase that, you header will inevitably loads first then your contents followed by your sidebars and footer.
The header is deemed as the most important part of the template for it contains all the crucial information about your blog. The main title of your blog is located there and so are your meta descriptions and meta keywords. These are the information that Search Engines get fed first upon coming to your site and that will be the information that your blog for your post is going to be indexed with.
Many has argued that meta descriptions and meta keywords are old school SEO, but in reality, meta description do still plays an important role in on-site SEO of a WordPress blog. For those who are wondering what meta descriptions are, they are the short description of what your blog or what your post is about. If you do a Search on any topic, you will see in the search results, the Title of the sites in bold followed by a short description below. If your keywords are included within the first 160 characters, these too will be in bold meaning it has given your post or blogs more Search juice, giving you more authority on the topic you are posting about. Your blog will rank higher in the SERPs even if your Page Rank is lower than a blog that do not have these useful descriptions. The All In One SEO plugin lets you write a short meta description for each of your post. The Thesis Theme has all this integrated so you won’t need any plugins.
After scanning through the Header, the Search Engines should then look at your contents. If you have structured your post contents properly with the necessary keywords and synonyms for your keyword spread-ed out evenly, you will please Search Engines even more and rank even higher.
Only after looking at these two crucial part of your WordPress Theme should the Search Engines go to your sidebars and footer. These two areas are where you normally insert your Ads, blogrolls and other information. Search Engines do not place much importance on these information. Of course there are many other factors in a Theme that determines the SEO of the Theme, but structure wise, this pattern should be observed.
In the days of old, we were taught how Search Engines reads our blogs. It reads the header, go to the left side or your Theme, then move towards the right. Thus, all those who understood this pattern will use a theme which has a right sidebar, because we want our contents on the left for the Search Engines to see first. This fact was further solidified by some experts who did researches on the reading and using habits of computer users. The research discovered that the majority of Net Surfers are right handed and places their mouse on the right side of their computers. Their cursors will also be resting on the right hand corner of their monitor when they are reading from the monitors. Accordingly, if you have Ads on the right sidebar, it will be closes to the cursor and it will bring in more clicks. Or so says those experts. LOL.
WordPress Theme designers, realized this fact, but still there are many who prefers to have a left sidebar. So designers turned to re-arranging their php codes to make the contents comes first before the sidebars, thus forcing Search Engines to read the contents first before going to the sidebar, which ever side they might be located. This rendered all the facts that we have learned in the early days about WordPress Themes quite useless.
To determine if your WordPress Theme is structured this way, all you have to do is to load up your Theme, then press Ctrl + F5 to force re-load. See if your contents loads immediately after your header before loading the sidebars. If it does, then you have a good and well structured WordPress Theme. If it loads the sidebars first, you might want to consider changing your Theme.
