Almost 99.9% of Wordpress Theme Developers out there say that their wordpress theme is SEO optimized. But not all of them really are, even expensive premium themes. All they do is recommend the installation of All-in-One SEO Pack. But in my opinion, AIOSEOP is so not enough to make your WP theme SEO optimized especially if the template tags are messed up themselves.

I Dont even install AIOSEOP in my site, I do the editing of the title tags and meta description manually, because it helps me learn SEO much better. But if you want to make it easier I guess AIOSEOP is a good plugin. But as I have mentioned previously AIOSEOP cannot fix messed up h1 tags that are in your theme. And these tags is important in SEO.

The following is a step-by-step method on how to check if your WP theme is SEO Optimized:

1. Install the Web Developer Plugin for Firefox, this only works in Firefox so if you dont have it you better install it.

Download:

Code:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60

2. Visit the demo site or your own site after you enabled the theme.

4. Click on CSS > Disable Styles > All Styles on the Web Developer Toolbar or simply press Ctrl-Shift-S.

What this does is strip out all the javasript and css styling in your website. Something like what a google bot will do when it crawls your site.

Now to know if that theme is SEO Optimized, the Title or your main keyword should be at the very top of the webpage after you disabled styling. Some themes will show your logo first with no keyword. But in my opinion its better if your main keyword is the first one up there. My site had better results in SERP this way. And as much as possible your main content should go before the sidebar and the footer.

H1 Tags
From my knowledge in SEO there should only be one h1 tag occuring in any given page. This is where most themes mess up your SEO. There was one time I had a theme that had 6 h1 tags in the home page, the Blog Title and the recent posts were all tagged with h1. I tried searching my post through google and the first result that came up was from my homepage and did not direct me to where the actual post was, this was pretty weird and messed up till I found out about the h1 tags.

To check this just press Ctrl + U on your browser and then Ctrl + F and find how many h1 tags there are in the page your viewing.

In the homepage the h1 should be your main keyword, while on the post page the post title should be wrapped in h1 tag.

Well I guess that's it. Also dont forget about the meta description, and meta keywords tag on your header, as this is a pretty big factor in SEO.
An Awesome and Free Wordpress SEO Tutorial I found. I actually read a product that was sold in WF before that was pretty much something like this.

Code:

http://www.nathanrice.net/blog/wordpress-seo-the-ultimate-guide-to-wordpress-theme-search-engine-optimization/

Does anyone else think that meta keywords tag really does not have much significance on SEO? I know the title and description make a huge difference, but I really haven't been able to track any significant improvements / changes / or anything at all through the keywords tag.

Originally Posted by g111k

Does anyone else think that meta keywords tag really does not have much significance on SEO? I know the title and description make a huge difference, but I really haven't been able to track any significant improvements / changes / or anything at all through the keywords tag.

They are not important for SEO anymore according to Matt Cutts

Well, instead of going through all this installation and disabling styles, etc one can just view the page in lynx.
As for meta tags, they don't matter in google. However description tag is displayed under the title in serps (exceptions apply) so it's a good idea to have it optimized for potential human visitor. Keyword tag is still important in yahoo and possibly other search engines.

yes, you totally got it right!

I have seen *many* themes where they use H1 tag for the blog title (!) instead of post title all the time, this shows that people who made those themes have NO clue about SEO whatsoever.

Matt Cutts has said H1 tags don't mean anything, but I've been told META tags don't mean anything, same with on-page SEO, it's down to what you believe, I'd rather have a load of SEO which doesn't apparently effect anything, then not have it, although I'm just going to stick to AIO-SEO.

I suggest that you make an experiment with all of these myths. Not because Mat Cutts said that this doesn't work then you will believe him?

buy a random non-keyword domain and a small hosting, and there you should conduct your experiments.

nice piece of advice, I personally favor the hands-on approach as well.
MC is just a drone for G, you can shove aside anything he ever says and waste no time on following his "directions". Totally agree with Alex @6.
from my test, title and meta matter a lot. no-follows are still important, no matter what fake gurus say. surprisingly, there are other search engines out there, besides G.
last but not least, unless you have a very WH, very visited site with people spending minutes to read your content, do not use G. Analytics - it pushes the info straight into the ranking algorithm and demotes your pages based on fluff metrics like bounce rate.

and one more thing on G - if you use a Webmaster account (which you should), silly as it may sound, try to create separate accounts for separate websites. G loves to know when several properties have the same owner and lowers the value of interlinks when it catches up.

H1...Meta....
Whether or not they help in the SEO and SERP rankings,

Until Google announces their algorithm, and most is still speculation
I'd rather do them and be safe than NOT.