why open source can harm your SEO Ranking

I came across a video tutorial and blog post outlining the negative effects a "template," specifically a wordpress template, could have on your search engine ranking.

Something I am very interested in because I have achieved a great page ranking for a specific keyphrase and I am about to launch a new version of my site using wordpress as my back end technology.

Here are my issues.

I need to be able to custom design a website from scratch;

meaning I can design a site to look the way I want it to look,

ahem, or the way the client wants it to look.

Usually, a website from scratch is something very difficult to do with an open source template.

These templates are usually made for people who don't know how to code or don't want to pay a designer to code. So for designers it's difficult to use the "convenient" back end functionality and then "skin" the templates to look the way we want.

I am getting a handle on this challenge and will post the process in a series of you tube videos once I am completed with the project.

But my next issue is this concern with my SEO ranking.

A lot of hard work, time, and energy has gone into my page ranking. Although I would love to have my new sight up and running with wordpress driving the technology, I don't want my page ranking to suffer from the upgrade.

This article that explains what could go wrong, is coming from a company that claims they have the "solution" if you pay the $90 bucks for their template. Which technically I think is a great value, but...

It seems to have the same issues as normal templates, the inability to customize the site the way I need to.

What I learned from the "explanation" is that google loves clean code, so as long as my sight "validates" I should be good.

In addition, I have not yet put the new site's design through my SEO optimizer tool to see if all the SEO techniques are fully functional.

I hope that my original approach works; but, if not, I will probably have to look into this for a solution.

I think now is a perfect time to point out one of the "drawbacks" to using a templated open source solution. Some nopun potential clients lose because they think they can save some dough by using these free readily available solutions. Actually these free templates could be doing more harm and cost more to correct than hiring a professional graphic designer from the start.

check out the demo and great explanation here;

http://www.copyblogger.com/thesis-theme-for-wordpress/