There is a great number of free or inexpensive design templates available for all kinds of blogging software. They are easy to install and can be, to some extent, easily modified.

They come in different arrangements of content blocks and color schemes. When it comes to looking for that close-to-the-perfect template, we spend hours picking the right graphical design.

But there is more to it than colors, visual structure or cool pictures; it also has to have the right HTML coding or the correct, as some of us say, “invisible part”.

As I went through a number of different designs that look “clean” and “usable”, I found that most of them did not have the best HTML foundation for the optimized presentation of your content.
There is no doubt that the designers spent a lot of time creating these templates, considering the details that they have incorporated in their designs.

However, as I scanned the code I could tell that there were things that are just not SEO. This article uncovers some of the common mistakes made by pro and not so pro web designers that create free downloadable blog templates.

1. Headers
When one creates a page he or she would have a <h1> header (in most cases used once per page) to emphasize the topic covered on a given page. Search engines are aware of such practices and use them in their algorithms to, perhaps, define keywords for the page.

So, headers are valuable for stating your keyword/phrases as well as giving your visitors a general idea about a page’s content.

Therefore <h1> header should vary from page to page and describe the rest of the page right to the point. However, I have found that many designers use <h1> in the headers of their templates and include only the name of the blog, which will stay the same from page to page. Such a waste!

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2. Page Titles
It’s always nice to have a page title that looks something like this:

Page Topic – Website Name

or simply

Page Topic

But you will see that a bunch of templates will have the site’s name in front of the page topic. You want your visitors to see what this page is about before they read the name of the website. Plus it works much better with SE’s and their keyword assigning algorithms.

3. Archive Links
I suggest that you take off any references to archive pages for your blog, especially if you have just a few categories and rarely make your posts.

It may duplicate contents of the root page of your blog and that is not cool! Although Google seems to go nicely about dupes these days, I still wouldn’t risk it.

4. Rel=”Nofollow”
If some of the pages to which you link from your blog pages are not important for your commercial purposes (About us, Contact, blah-blah page, etc), make sure they include rel=”nofollow” attribute and don’t suck out the PR from the important pages.

So, ok these are some of the basic and frequently appearing problems you should be aware of. Take your time to investigate the SEO level of your favorite design by, of course, looking up the source of the page.

If you don’t know much about HTML get a friend or a professional to look into this matter. It is very important to be set up the right way from the beginning.

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