Search Engines love the Document Outline

Make no doubt about it, search engines love a well laid out document outline on a web page.

My opinion?

This is not my opinion. The very first thing mentioned in the Google Design and Content Guidelines portion of their webmaster guidelines is “Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links”. Your first question might be, what is a hierarchy. Well, it’s a document outline.

Headers

The document outline on the web page usually follow the headers of the web page. The headers would be the h1, h2 etc. The most important being the h1 header. The h1 header tells the world what the web page is all about. The default wordpress set-up, has the name of the website as the h1. That means every page of the website is about one thing – The name of the website.

DocOut Headers

The Docout headers have the name of articles and the names of pages as the h1. This is exactly what each page is about. Secondary is the name of the site. Think about it. The title set on every page is what the web page is about! The titles on wordpress are derived from the article titles and page titles.

Developing Themes

If your going to be developing themes, do yourself a favor. Start out with the DocOut theme. Use it as a base, then add your design work to it.

New WordPress Themes

If your looking for a new theme to add to your website, do yourself a favor. Check the document outline before you use any theme. I did a very quick document outline check on the most popular themes being used and most, if not all, have their document outline setup wrong.