Custom Blog Themes vs Default Themes

Darren Rowse of Problogger had an interesting post in April about Custom vs Premade Blog Themes. For those doing everyday blogging just for themselves-the decision is pretty easy to take the free blog templates with the wide selection and new themes occurring daily. However, for those who are doing some serious Internet marketing, in very competitive categories, there are more important considerations. Most of our business clients want a custom theme for their blog-it’s an extension of their website and other marketing material. They are also integral to branding and yes, they are prettier…but the real reason you may want to consider a custom blog is for what you can’t see.

Custom blogs have some very important features “under the hood” food for all the search engine spiders! A custom blog should not only include all of the above but the coding of the blog should also be customized for your search engine optimization efforts. Specifically, when you go to a blog and hit “page” and then “view source” you can tell right away if the $5,000 dollars you spent on the custom blog includes any SEO efforts. If you see a lot of talk about “content type” and “robots content = index, follow blah, blah” you didn’t get your money’s worth for SEO. All things being equal, a spider comes to your site and reads top to bottom and left to right-unless your coder has instructed otherwise. So, a custom blog that doesn’t have unique content right at the top is doing you a disservice. Custom sites, especially those charging $5,000 should have all of these components-it makes me wonder why we are only charging $1,950 for ours! Don’t forget that after you have the custom blog you need to fill it with a lot of unique and authoritative content to be truly successful. Darren tells us that the original material for his post came from Matthew Coddington from Net Business Blog-another very good read! There is another great resource on this topic. It was submitted by Wendy Piersall and called Is Your Blog Template Holding You Back? Enjoy!

Steve Mertz
SEO Speaker