Is my theme costing me traffic? | Bloggers Lair | Yakezie Forums

I'm looking for some honest feedback. I've had my site for about 7 months now. When I first started my plan was to spend as little money as possible so I have not wanted to purchase a theme. But at this point I wonder how much that might be hurting me. Aside from gaining a more pleasing layout that will appeal to visitors, would upgrading my theme help with SEO and search results? Should I just pay for a better theme at this point and what are some recommendations for what I should be looking for?

I'm considering the Canvas theme from Woo themes since it seems pretty straightforward and is fairly inexpensive. I would need something with fairly good support since the tech/programming stuff is not my strong suit and I would be worried about screwing things up with the switch.

Feedback and recommendations are greatly appreciated!

Hi Kay,

Your website looks fine. Reasonable layout, white space, etc. As long as the look is acceptable, I doubt whether another theme will make much difference in traffic. One note about it right now is that the picture of a rattlesnake will freak out some people, because a portion of the population is terrified of reptiles. (I have lived for thirty years with one of those people. She would never revisit your site.) Pictures are great. Everybody loves furry animals. Think about the pictures that make people feel good, if you want them to stay. Think of this as your living room. Most visitors would not take a seat if the pictures on the wall made them nervous.

There is only so much you can do with a website itself to get more traffic. Decent content and you get search engine traffic. Posting a 1000+ word thoughtful article once a week sustained over time gets that traffic. Quality links elsewhere on financial sites that point to site will help. Anchor text helps. The key issue is sustained activity. If you do not like blogging for the sake of blogging, you will start to hate your hamster wheel. Social traffic is flighty, but some people like it. You have lots of comments, so somebody is stopping by.

If one is committed to personal finance blogging for the long-run, you will deepen your financial knowledge. In addition, however, if you do not commit to learning the technology, you will constrain yourself and have to pay for things you do not need to pay for. Websites are just a bunch of scripts that you can edit, if you learn how to do so. Google searching and forums are your friends to learning how. The Wordpress site has lots of information. Plugins will help as ready-made tools. It is confusing at the outset, but it begins to make sense the more you commit to learning the how-to of websites. Once you learn how to edit your scripts (safely – always have backups for restoration), you can change the look of your site however you want it to be.

Some specific comments about the site:

* Tried the Hellobar on several sites and tossed it. Little yield for wasted screen real estate. Plus it messed up other plugins.

* Every link on the home page (and other pages) tells Google what is important about your site. Unimportant links dissipate your "link juice".

* Are the blogroll sites your friends? If not, I could ditch the blogroll

* I would edit the footer script to ditch the Powered by Wordpress link

* I would edit the various scripts to ditch the links to the tag, author, and the other archives because they also dissipate your link juice.

* Same with sidebar archives

* Also kill the "Join 23 other subscribers" phrase above subscribe. I tend to avoid supplying numerics and let the user decide if they like what you have, rather than judging the site by metrics.

Again, if traffic building is the concern, what you do offsite is much more important than what you do onsite. If the look is acceptable and your content is decent quality, raise the visibility of your site elsewhere.

Larry

Wow, thank you all for the great comments. 

Mr. Utopia – your insight on the Canvas theme is very helpful and it's great that I can look at your site for a real example. I love the look of your site, so I have to imagine the theme would be good for me.

Larry – awesome feedback. I am going to implement some of your suggestions, especially regarding the unimportant links. I'm going to look things over and get rid of the unnecessary.  (BTW, I don't normally have pictures of reptiles on my site. I just thought it was funny because of the post title. I never thought I might drive people away! I might try to find a more pleasing picture for that one…)

Moneystepper – thanks for your feedback. I will remove the adsense banner up there. You are right, it is not necessary. I don't have any specific articles that I can dig up regarding the SEO claim. I do remember reading that a theme that allows for pagination rather than just an "older posts" link like on mine is better for SEO. Somehow it helps search engines? But I'm not sure how. And I might have read that from a theme developer, so maybe they are just trying to sell a product? I just had the general sense that new themes might have something going on that makes it easier for the bots to crawl them or something? But the feedback I'm getting here is that won't make much difference for me even if it were an incremental help. So I might just try to stick with the free theme for now, since I'm super cheap! :)

Thank you guys for the awesome responses! I truly appreciate you each taking the time to give me valuable feedback!

Mobile friendly themes are becoming more important. I'm trying to save up some money to change my theme later this year.

I've used WooThemes Canvas on a number of different blogs over the years and can wholeheartedly recommend it. It doesn't "age" as quickly as many other themes, is well supported and you don't have to be a design pro to make tweaks or to make it look halfway decent.