Blog template or theme is a design in XML format composed of XML, CSS and Javascript code that can be used to create a blog, website or app on any content management system (CMS) such as Blogger, WordPress, others.
Template determines the appearance and functionalities of a blog site. In other words, theme or template is the frame of any blog site.
What is Search Engine?
Search engines are like a library with Librarians (bots) who go (crawl) from shelf to shelf to read and understand the content of each book, put them in index, and provide the books to the readers who visit the library. The librarian having read every single book in the library can tell exactly which book will answer the questions of the searcher (reader).
In this context, search engines like Google and Bing use artificial intelligence (bots) to crawl on the web from one site to the other to understand the information on the web pages, and put the pages in an index. Such pages in an index can appear on search engine results page when there are queries information on the pages can provide answer to. Search engines use algorithms to analyze any query and pages in index to determine the pages that are most likely to answer the query putting into consideration many ranking factors which determine the order of ranks of the pages.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engines Optimization
If the search engine crawler was not able to crawl and index any of your site pages, such pages can’t appear on search results when queries they could answer are made. So what you do or have to do to ensure that your web pages appear on search engine results is called search engine optimization.
What is SERP?
It stands for Search Engines Results Page. It is the page where the results of search queries appear on Google or any other search engine.
There are many factors that can affect your site (blog) pages search engines appearance, but for the sake of this article, we are focusing on template.
Read also: How to Use IndexNow let Bing, Yandex, other Search Engines Crawl and Index Your Posts
Effects of Theme on Blog Site Search Engines Optimization
Scrawling and Indexing
Messy code of a site slows down bots, affecting the crawling and indexing of your site. Bloated and non-W3C compliant code causes major crawling problems. You to make sure your site template is not a scrapped theme and have got good HTML to text ratio. To get your blog posts (pages) on the search engines results page, it needs to be crawled and indexed by search engines bots.
Responsiveness
Responsiveness of a website is the ability of the site to offer a consistent experience on both desktop and mobile devices and reach wider audience. Non responsive design theme will hamper your site’s ability to good experience to desktop and mobile device users. Make sure your template is compatible on both mobile and despot display. Search engines such as Google deploy mobile and desktop crawler to crawl your site contents at different occasions. If your site theme is not compatible to any device, it will prevent the crawler from crawling and possibly indexing your site contents.
Your site Mobile Usability depends on your template
To test your site's Mobile Usability, go to Google Search Console, at the menu, click on Mobile Usability as shown on the screenshot bellow.
Loading Speed
A bad template delays the loading of your site. The average site load time is 10.3 seconds for desktop and 27.3 seconds for mobile. With bad theme, the load time can increase to above 70 seconds, and this will affect user experience as many users may not be patient to wait for your site to load, before they hit back button. Delayed load time leads to increase in bounce rate. Google algorithm aggregates many factors before showing results to search queries, which includes site speed, bounce rate and overall user experience.
Last line
A template that is well coded and with well-constructed titles, quick loading, etc. can help you greatly in the task of optimizing your site for search engines. Ensure to use a good template for your website. If you are finding it difficult getting Google or any other search engine to crawl and index your blog pages, among other things you should do, run a check on your blog template to know if it is the cause. If it is, try checking the codes. If you are not good in coding, talk to a developer, or change the theme entirely.
Read also: How to Generate and Add XML Sitemap to Blogger Blog