The 5 Best WordPress Themes for SEO Visibility

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Theme selection to optimize your website’s SEO is more important than you might think. SEO can easily be negatively affected by poorly written themes. Specifically, the following points can hurt your SEO or the user experience causing your search engine rankings to suffer:

• The inability to remove spammy links. Too often free or low-cost WordPress themes are given away in some campaign to generate leads and come with code and links that can hurt your organic search visibility.
• Poor usability can result in higher bounce rates
• Non-mobile friendly designs will suffer to Google’s SEO scrutiny
• Poor design will result in a lower average time per page which tells Google your content isn’t relevant resulting in a lower ranking
• Slow loading time from a bloated them will also go against Google's best practices for SEO
• Regular updates and ongoing support. Very few free or low-cost themes are patched for security purposes or upgraded when new versions of WordPress rollout. This leaves your site open to all sorts of vulnerabilities from hacking to poor SEO performance.

These all contribute to the overall user experience, and will consequently affect your SEO. With that knowledge as a base, we set out to find the top five WordPress themes for SEO visibility. This list will outline our top five and give you insights into how they will strengthen your site’s SEO performance.

1. SEO WP

According to Brian Dean, renowned SEO expert, SEO WP is his top recommendation for SEO optimized WordPress themes. What makes it so special?

• From the minute you download it, you a get blazing fast theme load time of only three seconds, which greatly improves the SEO of the website and the overall user experience.
• Your website is fully responsive and will look great on any webpage. They validate every site with a Google mobile-friendly check.
• Consistently updated each month to have the best written code for SEO and to make sure it is free of all known bugs.
• Lightweight design and code cuts the average size of your site in a third.

In addition to a solid SEO foundation the theme comes with a free live composer page builder which allows you to customize the theme to any layout you desire.

Read more about the SEO WP theme or read user reviews and try it out on ThemeForest.

2. BoomBox

BoomBox is a solid theme choice right out of the box. It was designed specifically for SEO because its purpose is to cater towards creating viral content and building popular websites that generate a large amount of traffic each day.

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by Jacob McMillen via SitePoint