It is not that easy to design fine looking templates whether Word Press or Joomla or any additional solution that is a Content Management System (CMS) web site. It is a challenging task for many people including myself when you start working on the graphics and designing.
Because of the complications of creating an exceptional template, we prefer using the alternative which is FREE templates. These templates are available to CMS system and we fancy using it for making web sites for the members, though these FREE templates can be unfavorable to our engine rankings, web site traffic and SEO.
There are certain guidelines you need to follow when working with FREE templates. I have chosen some things which should be watched out using FREE templates for designing my websites.
1. Links to designer's web site:
It is an appropriate and fair thing to link back to designer whose template you have chosen to use. It is not necessary to link back to designer more than one place, just a plain Original Template “designer’s name and link”. Designer often put these phrases in expanded version like the hosting and web design by “the designer’s name and link”. Links like these can cost your business because you are also working in hosting services and web designing. You should necessarily check these links which are feed in web site and try to limit them to bottom of the page so that you can avoid harming your reputation as web designer and hosting service provider.
2. Target tags of designer's web site:
It has been observed by me that majority of the times, these links available on the FREE templates provided on designer’s web site as well as other links to validation of HTML, are not targeted to a new page instead it will replace the web site you have designed when members and other people click on these various links. You need to rectify all these things and ensure that you add target=”_blank” in the link to guarantee that the traffic you expected to be created by your website is not lost.
3. Distinct keywords embedded in code:
An important area of web site designing where SEO is affected are the image title and alt tags. Many of the times, the images of the FREE templates has these title and alt tags with the name of the designer as “comment” tags like alt=”spacer pic”. These tags are extremely important when search engines like Google determines the keyword density of your web site and web pages especially those ones who are near to the top of the web page of yours, i.e. header images and logo. These tags are stuffed up with unrelated keywords which can be detrimental in you rankings of search engines. Proper attention is required to ensure your template contains all the information about your web site. Tags like alt and title should contain phrases and keywords of the relevant content of your designed web sites and web pages.
Working for some time on these FREE templates will have substantial effect on ranking by the search engines.
