Theme authors come in two different shapes and sizes: those who integrate SEO "functionality" into their themes and those who don't. If you're in the camp of integrating SEO functionality into your theme, you've got yet another choice to make: do you "yield" for site owners that have an SEO plugin installed, disabling your own SEO functionality or do you deny them that choice.
For those who do decide to yield and for those who do not integrate SEO functionality into their theme, this is the guide to follow on how to make sure your theme works with all the major SEO plugins and more in particular, my WordPress SEO plugin.
Basics
Whether or not your theme is in the WordPress.org repository, you should strive to meet their Theme Review guidelines. With the theme check plugin you can simply check whether that's the case for most of the technical aspects. This makes sure you have all the necessary hooks for plugins to do their work. If any of those fail, fix them before even looking at the stuff below.
Head elements
Titles
The most common issue with SEO plugins and WordPress themes is with titles: theme authors have a tendency to hardcode (sections of) titles into their themes, which results in hard to fix behavior, which I recently discussed here and hasn't been fixed in WordPress core yet. In short, your title should be not even a tiny bit longer than this:
<title><?php wp_title(''); ?></title>If you decide to embed SEO functionality in your theme, you should then put a filter function on to that wp_title functionality just like a plugin would. This allows you to "unhook" that filter when an SEO plugin is active.
Meta's
Meta tags come in a vast amount of shapes and sizes, but there are only a few that "matter". There are the meta description, the meta keywords (on which I have a strong opinion too) and the meta robots tag. In my opinion, your theme should never embed any of these meta tags, but, if you decide to embed SEO functionality into your theme, write functions for these things and hook them on to the wp_head action.
Be very, very sure to allow for site owners to fully disable any meta functionality you write. I regularly, read: daily, advise people to change themes when their theme has a lot of SEO stuff embedded that is just plain wrong or collides with other plugins. Make no mistake: a portion of your users, probably a large portion of your users, cares about their SEO. Getting it wrong is worse then not doing anything, so if I were a theme author I'd most definitely opt for the latter.
Link items
There are a lot of <link> items that matter for SEO these days. There are rel=canonical, rel=next and rel=prev and a few more. WordPress does rel=canonical on single posts and pages but nowhere else yet, though a patch for core is ready to make WordPress add rel=canonical in more cases, but your theme should not do any of these. You're, to be honest, bound to get them wrong.
If you do decide to add them, do it in the same fashion as meta elements: hook them on to wp_head and make sure site owners can disable the functionality.
Body elements
Breadcrumbs
While the above points make integration for any SEO plugin easier, this point is more specific for my own WordPress SEO plugin. Integration of my breadcrumbs is quite easy, use something like the following code:
if ( function_exists('yoast_breadcrumb') ) {
yoast_breadcrumb('<div id="breadcrumbs">','</div>');
}This code will not display anything unless the breadcrumbs feature of my SEO plugin is enabled.
Breadcrumbs Variables
This breadcrumb path takes the following 3 variables:
$prefix
The code that your breadcrumb should be prefixed with. Default to an empty string.
$suffix
The code that should be added on the back of your breadcrumb. Default to an empty string.
$display
If set to false, will return the breadcrumb path instead of echo-ing it. Defaults to true.
Other body elements
You should take note of my guides on HTML heading structure and HTML Sitemaps. While my SEO plugin doesn't "interfere" with those, it's good practice to make them optimal. You should also read my WordPress SEO Theme Guidelines to make sure you're doing all the other necessary things.
Is your WordPress SEO plugin active?
You should check whether a constant named WPSEO_VERSION is defined, preferably like this:
if ( defined('WPSEO_VERSION') ) {
// Disable your SEO stuff
}WordPress SEO Plugin Theme Integration Guide is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!