SEO dilemna: the trouble with templates

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Let’s face facts: the template is to an SEO like gravity was to Sir Isaac Newton. Templates are the bread and butter of the search-engine friendly crowd, and it’s no surprise way. Templates can help you ruthlessly destroy your SERPS competition with a machine-like precision. The advantages of templates for SEO are:

1) They give a uniformity of design for users and search engines which make the pages well categorized and tidily SEO’d upon creation
2) They make for extremely powerful internal linking schemes which are auto-generated and semantically accurate. All this with one push of the button
3) They make it so that technically non-savvy people have the power of a programmer’s knowledge behind them when they press ENTER on their newest creation of content.

But in these strengths likes the seeds of destruction. Because a template is a soul-less machine generated script, it can only do what you tell it. And if you make a mistake, your template will go on an on, replicating your mistake forever.

Your template’s ruin is folly’s doom

Once your template has blown it’s gasket (it could be something as imperceptible as a colon where you meant a comma, or a sub-directory name missing it’s forward slash. Whatever the mistake is, it will sink you in the end, because it will screw up the entire structure of your website. An example of this happening on a wide scale is the 301 problems people keep reporting. If you don’t combine your WWW and non-www domain names into one URI, you’ll end up having some nasty duplicate content problems, which generally sink your Google ratings.

If you’ve suffered a ranking drop lately and you use a template, double check for errors. I’ve included links to a few tools you can use to check your template for errors.

Related resources:

• Xenu’s Link Sleuth Use the Link Sleuth to make sure you don’t have any bad internal links. Linking incorrectly from internal pages will slowly but surely poison your rankings. Always link consistently.
• Markup Validation Service at W3.org. Make sure your code validates. It cannot hurt you to do so.

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