0

I have a wordpress website for my business and its success will be largely dependent on google ranking.

The structure of the theme I'm using is designed for a blog, not for a business website. That means the source code is quite ugly-looking. My question is, does it affect SEO at all?

I know that it can affect SEO somehow by the page taking longer than needed to load, but apart from that, will there be any penalizing for having a suboptimal or confusing html structure?

Improve this question
7
  • 3
    Who says code for a blog is ugly? Or bad for SEO? Tons of blogs rank well.
    – John Conde ♦
    Jun 28, 2012 at 14:56
  • Let me explain: if you look at the main page, the main content will be buried deep inside a blog post-like element. Is not that blog structure is ugly, is that it makes you cringe when comparing it to my business content. There's a dissociation between structure and content.
    – legoblock
    Jun 28, 2012 at 14:58
  • @legoblock - Provided you have the main parts semantically correct - your title tags, header tags etc, the rest counts for very little. It's just noise to a search engine. Ask yourself, if your website contained extremely useful information or was the portal to a quality product or service, would it make sense for Google to penalize you for having ropey markup? I think not.
    – Anonymous
    Jun 28, 2012 at 15:07
  • If the content is clearly labeled then Web Crawlers will have no problem in finding and listing your content on Search Engines. Using WordPress, you'll have a better chance at SEO then coding HTML by hand, wherein it automatically labels H-Tags, there is an area to put in your keywords, and etc. The backend may not be neat, but the frontend is very organized accordingly to hierarchy.
    – nycmixing
    Jun 28, 2012 at 15:27
  • 1
    @nycmixing - Wordpress will not give you "a better chance at SEO" than hand-coding. SEO is a process, not an obtainable goal. You have much more control when coding things directly - just as an example, rich snippets for vertical search etc would be a pain in Wordpress with a plug-in or by being able to directly edit the HTML. That being said, the OP isn't well versed in SEO it seems, so he may be better off with Wordpress to begin with.
    – Anonymous
    Jun 28, 2012 at 15:54

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
1

As long as your website is semantically correct (it uses html elements correctly, and doesn't use the wrong html tag [e.g. it doesn't use <div> instead of <h1>]), you should be fine. What matters more is that you have good content and good links.

Improve this answer

Your Answer

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge that you have read and understand our privacy policy and code of conduct.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.