In the web, there are lots of websites that provide free themes/templates for blogs. When you browse them, you may be confused while choosing one for your blog. There are some which attract your eyes with great color combination. Some may be designed as per the technical requirement. Some are full of colorful images. The requirement changes with the objective/purpose/subject area of blog. But there are some common elements of a perfect theme or template.
From human perspective:
1. As many of you know that visitors don’t read contents of a page. They simply scan it at a first glance. So you need to represent your content in such a way that user can find easily what they are looking for. For that, your theme/template should have:
- Good visible navigation.
- Systematic ordering of information in a logical way.
- Use of different font style and font faces.
- Use of proper colors and style to differentiate between two objects.
- Use of brightness/darkness of objects and background.
- Good neat and clean appearance at first glance.
2. A blog theme/template provider should have plenty of room for the users feedback. If they are able provide prompt support to the users and make continuous improvement in the look and working of the the theme/template, the users will be happy.
From technical perspective
3. HTML and CSS validation is just like keeping the code of your theme/template syntactically correct. To check if the html is validated, use W3C Validator and CSS validator to validate style sheet. It’s difficult to say if it is required for search engines or not because a number of top ranking websites do not have validated markup and css. But search engines can read CSS. So you can stop them catching you spamming (by hiding your text) with the css.
4. The theme/template you choose should have good compatibility with different web browsers specially the popular ones like Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera etc. People also use different screen resolution (most viewed: 1024×768) for viewing web pages. For that, a liquid layout (that fits well in any resolution) will be an ideal one for increasing the usability.
5. A good theme or template has verbose comments in the code section to understand the starting/ending and reason for using the section. Perhaps you may need to change something after 1 year, you can be sure of where you are making the change based on the written comments.
6. If you are using wordpress blog, check if the theme is widget-ready. This option will help you adding/modifying/deleting contents easily.
7. A good theme always has a customized 404 page. You can get an idea of visitors experience when they land up to a 404 page. You can always put a search box and a contact form in that page to help visitors navigate to your other pages.
8. A good theme should have a search-engine friendly layout to help better indexing of a page. If you want search engines to crawl you keyword specific content to meet the keyword proximity demand.
[tags]blog theme design, elements of good theme, arindam[/tags]
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Hey! yesterday was my birthday. The whole Grmtech family was celebrating my birthday, wishing me with lovely words. My colleagues were taking photos and making fun. It was so touchy that went straight to my heart. Grmtech is a happy family.
[tags]my birthday, arin2u birthday, arindam[/tags]
If I ask you
Do search engines crawl blogroll links?
What will be your answer? Probably
yes
As blogs are becoming more popular, many sites are providing utility features like the one I’ve found. Blogrolling.com gives widget to automate the linking process through javascript. The concept is when you create your profile and links there, they will provide you with a small javascript code. If you add that code in multiple blogs, all your blogs will be updated at a time with those links. It’s that simple to manage your blogrolls. 
But my friends, Be Aware!
those links are not crawlable by the search engines if you are pretty conscious about SE rankings and getting link juice out of those links. For example, visit http://wealth-and-money.blogspot.com/ and look for “More To Explore!” links at the bottom of left sidebar. Also check the code for this javascript.
[tags]blogroll links, search engine crawlable links, javascript links, arindam[/tags]
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Few days back I went through DP forums and found Matt explaining about the quality of directories. The basis of judging the quality of a directory seems quite logistical to me. But I wondered how google is achieving it. I agree that Matt and his bots are smart and intelligent enough. But I also believe everything can’t be automated.
Do they use a manual editor to scan all the directories to check the following criterias?
“Does the directory reject urls? If every url passes a review, the directory gets closer to just a list of links or a free-for-all link site.”
“If there is a fee, what’s the purpose of the fee? For a high-quality directory, the fee is primarily for the time/effort for someone to do a genuine evaluation of a url or site.”
I know you are feeling worried and even I’m too. :-S
Regarding this comment,
What is the quality of urls in the directory? Suppose a site rejects 25% of submissions, but the urls that are accepted/listed are still quite low-quality or spammy. That doesn’t speak well to the quality of the directory.
All I can say, there are lots of directories available in the web (newly launching also) with a sole objective of manipulating links and website traffics, earning through ads etc. We need to be on the safe side while submitting in those directories:
1) Check for authentic page rank of the site. I used "authentic" because webmasters use fake pagerank.
2) Check for the number of quality backlinks for the directory in yahoo.
3) Check for quailty of websites listed in the same or relevant category based on your website theme or topic.
4) And last of all, check if the directory follows a proper review process (not automatic listings) to list your website.
Nothing is a rule of thumb in SEO but sticking to above rules may benefit your website as google thinks the websites that passed through this test/review are really good websites and can be ranked higher in the SERPs.
[tags]quality of directories and Matt, Matt Cutts explanation, Arindam[/tags]
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Today one of my friend knocked me and informed that he is very happy to get one referral link to his new website but when he types the url of page (from where he got the link) and presses return/enter key, he finds that the page url changes from http://www.example.com/ to http://www.example.com/root/home/. He was shocked to notice the unexpected change in the url. My friends, this is simply an url redirection.
He raise the question
why webmasters uses URL redirection
Possible reasons
Human Error: A trend is observed that people tend to forget big domain names and often end up in typing the wrong one. They also make typing mistake. So taking into consideration the human forgetfulness and error, often webmasters use short/simpler form of urls for redirection to the original url of the website, thus keeping the website traffic.
Moving a site to a new domain: If a webmaster wants to change his domain name say for specific business reason, he can use url redirection to keep his visitors in his website. It is quite possible that his website has got many incoming links from other websites or many people have bookmarked his websites. So he will set a redirection to his new url without loosing visitors. Search engines with also detect the new url.
To balance Traffic load or bandwidth usage: Webmasters often redirect url to a less traffic site in order to reduce the traffic load or website bandwidth usage of the existing high traffic site.
Search engine manipulation: Webmasters try to show popular search terms on page to search engines but redirect their website visitors to a different page. They often try to steal the page rank of one page and use it on the redirected page.
N.B.: Search engines now a days become smarter to identify such manipulations and take necessary actions (reduce ranks or ban) with the websites that employ such techniques.
Technical needs: Web tech guys use descriptive parameters in the urls like session information, transaction route etc for running applications properly. That’s why you may notice that the url is getting changed keeping the content same.
These are the reasons why webmasters use url redirection. I mailed all the above reason to him. Hope he’ll be satisfied. Do you like this info?
[tags]url redirection, site redirection, domain redirection, arindam[/tags]
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This is Arindam aka arin2u. I love blogging. I'm a SEO guy and gathering knowledge on internet marketing & Search engine optimisation is my target bcoz I find this field very dynamic. If you have any queries feel free to contract via the form. Also providing site building, web design and SEO services.
