Actinic Themes & SEO

[kathynewman]

Picking up on something Jont mentioned in another thread
"As pointed out above not all themes are equal in terms of SEO so applying a new theme can make a difference with everything else remaining the same. The smart theme was the best on offer in v7 at the time in terms of visual layout but proven not the best in terms of SEO."

Does anyone have an opinion as to which the best theme in V8 & V9 is for SEO?

Kathy

[pinbrook]

No but we can all tell you Smart is the worse, where the culprit is the nested tables

[jont]

The clean CSS layouts have shown to be the favourites in terms of SEO - they do then require the most work as they are pretty basic from a visual design point of view to bring them up to speed aesthetically.

You can always mix n match code between themes to give the desired results. With the Smart Theme is was the left hand navigation which causes the largest SEO issues.

Changing themes can help but should not be listed higher than say product descriptions, pages titles etc in a list of jobs to do SEO wise but it can give you a better foundation to build upon.

[george]

We did okay with the smart theme in v7, I think the only real modification was hardcoding the sections instead of the standard method.

[grantglendinnin]

I'd recommend Teclan's themes, the only thing their themes lack is absolute linking - they use relative linking. For example, instead of using the navigation links as 'CatalogURLSectionURL' they use the SectionURL - which isn't ideal, in particular for Yahoo ranking. One tag the links in our theme ('Cool Mint') lack is title tags for links - other than that, it seems pretty steady for SEO purposes. Though I'm now going to be looking into getting it as clean and validation error-free as possible, I know error-free is impossible in Actinic, though

Good luck

[jont]

I know error-free is impossible in Actinic

I think you mean free from errors on validation?

[TraceyHand]

I think you mean free from errors on validation?

you sure?

[RuralWeb]

I think the thread is refering to standard actinic themes rather than those produced by designers.

[grantglendinnin]

I think you mean free from errors on validation?

If I mentioned the phrase 'error-free validation' again it'd be considered keyword stuffing