Awesome post. I love Thesis and find great tips on Double Mule’s site for SEO customization of Thesis. (I think they just need to update their free manual with some of the changes in the latest Thesis release.) So there’s a tip for some of the Thesis experts out there! =) Yep, some of us would even pay a little something for the updated material and life-time updates.

Love your new Simplicity theme. It’s beautiful.

Thanks for helping to rock Thesis.

Kate

I would like to add my few cents however all concluded from my experience. SEO is much more than a theme in WordPress, it primarily relates to the content and the ability to make a Web visitor happy. Period.

Even the suckiest of pages (in terms of clutter, excess code, etc) are ranked well because the visitors of the page naturally keep coming back repeatedly. Google and many other search engines look at this and is tracked via the Bounce Rate. Bounce Rates can sensibly be interpreted as a visitor clicked on your link from a search result, looked at the page for a second or two, hit the back button and resumed their search. While this is not anything a site owner can control through a plugin, they can control it by cleanly presenting the content, ensuring the title and the Meta Description matches the content and headlines in the content are treated as such with appropriate headline tags.

While it is rather “scientific” to break out a long formula for how to optimize WordPress for SEO – what really is needed is to simply present content well for humans, and make sure your WordPress theme behaves itself from not including crap links or even rooted installs. (I’ve seen legitimately free themes with encrypted/encoded PHP scripts where it would pull links from somewhere and include it in your site without knowledge. Just an example.)

While I don’t personally use Thesis, the benefit in using a commercial WP theme is the support and the quality and trust you receive from the author in that it’s in their best interest to maintain it. On the contrary though, a commercial theme doesn’t necessarily make it better. Additional free frameworks for WP such as Thematic and Hybrid are decent competition for These and can deliver “clean” code and an SEO optimized site out of the box.

SEO — like social media — is not a product, rather a practice in how content is displayed on the screen in accordance to guidelines from search engines. Offsite SEO is equally as important and it helps to forge relationships with similar content publishers in the same space. Posting slopping comment spam will only net you a nofollow link back and no benefit.

Content is king, but compliance to usability standards and overall user experience is queen and performance is jack.

Just some thoughts. I hope someone found this useful.

~joe

WordPress has been horrible for SEO over the years. The “content is king” folks have always been wrong… although they may be less wrong now than they used to be (because WordPress and themes have improved).

Even today, each new release includes code changes that for some reason screw around with the behavior of the permalinks management. Change a permalink and what does WordPress do? Install a 301 redirect? Install 302 redirect? Throw a 404 at the old URL? Your guess is as good as mine as it seems they change the behavior EVERY TIME THEY UPDATE.

The Thesis people want to sel their product, so of course they say it’s all in the theme. It’s not all in the theme.

Oh and of course don’t forget Google is also changing… there is ALWAYS a need for SEO for WordPress.