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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?

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    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
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    @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

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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.

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