Displaying 1 To 15 Of 15 Comments I have a feeling that with all this SEO stuff built into Genesis, that having All In One SEO installed would be overkill. Actually, feel free to install AIOSEO or Headspace2 or SEO Title Tag … Genesis will detect when these plugins are active, and any duplicate functionality will be handed over to the plugin. For instance, if AIOSEO is active, you won’t see the in-post SEO options that Genesis normally provides. Or, if you have SEO Title Tag, Genesis won’t generate your Title Tag for you … PLUS it will actually output the SEOTT function to the proper location, so you don’t have to modify the header.php file. Genesis does not come with any child themes There is actually a sample child theme available in the Genesis forums for people to download and try out. It’s not much, but it does give you something to get you started creating your own child themes. » Posted By Nathan Rice On February 4, 2010 @ 4:05 PM Write For People, Not For Spiders @Chris, If the theme you’re buying has “SEO” listed in a bullet point list of features with no elaboration, it’s probably nothing special. Ask for details!!! StudioPress themes (as they stand right now, pre-Genesis) are pretty good at SEO. Not great, but pretty good. We’ve done a considerable amount of work bringing Genesis up to par with other themes that do SEO well. » Posted By Nathan Rice On January 26, 2010 @ 3:03 PM WRT the “write for humans” anecdote, here’s a good rule of thumb. Write your title and content for humans, sure, but be aware that they aren’t the only ones “reading” your content. Try to at lease slip a keyword or part of a keyphrase into your post/page titles (wrapped in H1 of course). Then use Thesis, Genesis, Hybrid, or AiOSEO/Headspace2 plugins to craft the doctitle. Users won’t ever see that anyway, but it’s what search engines look at before anything else on-site. I’m not saying to stuff keywords in there … I hate that, and I don’t think it works very well … I’m just saying to use it to rewrite your title to target your keyword or keyphrase. That way, you don’t have to look at this as an either/or scenario. You can write both for humans AND spiders and get the benefits from both. » Posted By Nathan Rice On January 26, 2010 @ 10:16 AM @Jeff, If anyone cares to know, here’s what to look out for … If the theme you’re buying has “SEO” listed in a bullet point list of features, then it’s probably BS. Maybe you’ll give them the benefit of the doubt … so send them an email and ask why they think their theme is so SEOwsome. If they don’t have a convincing response, run … far away. These are the people who are going to be presenting your content to the world. If they’re amateurs, you will get amateur results. Run. What’s a convincing response? Well, that’s up to you to decide. I’ll tell you what ISN’T a convincing response … telling me that SEO doesn’t matter or that all WP themes are “basically the same”. Again, run away from them. I can tell you, in detail, why Genesis is coded properly for SEO. The same goes for Thesis. The same goes for Hybrid. If the author of the theme can’t tell you EXACTLY what makes his theme SEO, run. » Posted By Nathan Rice On January 25, 2010 @ 4:03 PM Jeff, For instance, You take these things for granted because they were done for you by a developer who paid attention to what he was doing. Not all themes are built this way. In fact, most aren’t. Do you enjoy all that google traffic? Further optimizing your theme would likely result in even more of it. Search engine traffic is extremely valuable, mainly because it’s free, and mostly new traffic. If you sold something on this site, a 5-10% increase in SE traffic WOULD matter to you, I guarantee that. And BTW, no one is saying that you have to abandon writing for humans. I’m specifically talking about optimizing themes for search engines. This takes little to no ongoing effort. » Posted By Nathan Rice On January 25, 2010 @ 3:41 PM I wouldn’t get too excited. If the theme isn’t developed in-house (like P2 and Monotone), then it will probably be farmed out to a relatively unknown person. A possible exception to this might be them taking something like Sandbox and bringing it into 2010. I doubt very seriously anyone who charges money for themes will be considered for the role. I also highly doubt that the theme will be loaded up with hooks or filters or any other framework-esque features. The default theme has always served as a sample theme. I wouldn’t expect to see that change. More than likely, it’ll be a bare-bones theme with excellent, minimal markup structure, well commented PHP and CSS, and liberal use of dynamic classes to accomplish the design. Kubrick’s major flaw has always been it’s outdated code. I’d also expect to see some CSS3 and maybe even HTML5. After all, the theme IS called 2010. » Posted By Nathan Rice On December 14, 2009 @ 4:33 PM iThemes Responds To Speculation – All Is Well For the record (in case anyone actually suspected), the “Nathan” above is NOT me. While I may no longer be with iThemes, I still have immense respect for the guys involved in producing themes there. You won’t find too many people who are better at what they do. As was mentioned above, iThemes does business/CMS style themes almost exclusively, and they do them well. Not sure what’s so bad about that? There are plenty other theme companies out there that only do 1-2 types of themes, so the criticisms above could apply to any one of them. Finally, I personally take exception to the “lack true development skills” language. If a theme company doesn’t make the TYPE of theme you like, then fine. But a drive-by comment like that should probably be kept to yourself. » Posted By Nathan Rice On August 28, 2009 @ 9:47 PM Is WordPress Information Too Fragmented? @Ian Stewart @Justin Tadlock » Posted By Nathan Rice On June 3, 2009 @ 4:28 PM @Andrew, If the blog network or central aggregator blog can make us richer, more popular, or more respected, then people might join. That’s a hard sell for a site/network that currently doesn’t even exist. The proverbial stars would need to align in order for something like this to work. There are just too many egos to deal with, among other challenges. However, if this were an official thing (say, hub.wordpress.org) and only the crem-della-crem were initially invited to have their sites officially aggregated, it might actually work. Sort of like wordpress.tv, but instead of videos, it would be a WordPress tutorials aggregator. Authors get to maintain their own blogs, and the community gets a central resource to find both good tutorials to read, and good tutorial writers to follow. Pie in the Sky. » Posted By Nathan Rice On June 3, 2009 @ 1:17 PM Think about this: I’m a little guy … I pull in 100 unique visitors a day to my blog that occasionally writes a good article on WordPress. I make $50 every now and then when someone buys an ad on my blog (probably a premium theme vendor’s ad). For me, it makes perfect sense to join a “network” or split profits with other WP bloggers. It’s a promotion for me. I’m a big guy … I pull in 1000-5000 unique visitors a day to my blog that writes DAILY articles on WordPress. I make $500-$3000 per month from advertising, affiliate marketing, or selling my own products. For me, it makes absolutely no sense to join a network, share my traffic, expertise, and income with a bunch of little guys. A network or central blog might work. But it’ll be comprised of little, mostly unsuccessful, small time bloggers looking to boost their profile, influence, or income, and it’s probably something that nobody will ever read. On the topic of the Codex: Yes, the Codex is incomplete. Yes, we bloggers write a lot of content that could go on the codex. But, as someone mentioned, if we put it on our blog, we get the traffic, the recognition, and the income. Why would we ever give that up? Generally, though, a lot of WordPress content published on blogs wouldn’t go well on the Codex. It’s personal writing. It’s not a technical paper, it’s a How-To article. The Codex is made up of function/template tag references with bare-bones explanations and examples. And that’s probably how it should be. Final thoughts: » Posted By Nathan Rice On June 3, 2009 @ 12:21 PM @Jeff Eaton Is it really? Because if it was, I would imagine there’d be a lot less fuss going on, and Matt would have mentioned it in the 2 different interviews he’s done on the subject. But it’s not … and he didn’t. And you neglected the fact that the GPL was specifically written for *compiled* code. Unique code is nearly impossible to create in languages like operational PHP. Like Beagle said, I would not ever expect a lawsuit over WP and the GPL to ever be decided against those who don’t believe themes inherit GPL. » Posted By Nathan Rice On May 22, 2009 @ 7:00 PM This is such a great post. It illustrates 2 things well: 1. Function/API calls don’t require license inheritance To illustrate my second point: FALSE. Hopefully, you see my point. But, as the article said, the WordPress project (being a private org) is free to take any action that may discourage the use of non-GPL themes, such as pulling them from the directory, publicly denouncing them, etc. So it’s a risk vs. reward scenario. Nathan » Posted By Nathan Rice On May 22, 2009 @ 12:13 PM Default Theme Framework Is Stupid For reference, this is what I was talking about: If the plan is to make this them into anything like these themes, then I stand by my statement. From the looks of the comments in that trac ticket, that seems to be the plan. EDIT: Reading over the comments of that trac ticket again gives me the impression that maybe they’re just looking to update the default theme to something with more solid code, and a prettier interface. Perhaps the referral to this new theme as a “framework” is just incidental. If so, then my comment doesn’t apply. That’s the “what”. I’ll try to explain the “why” some other time. » Posted By Nathan Rice On March 28, 2009 @ 11:35 AM @jeff, Many users like having the option of installing a theme on many sites, or they are developers and want to use the themes for multiple clients. » Posted By Nathan Rice On February 27, 2009 @ 2:25 PM Jeff, There are a few game changing, market leaders (iThemes, StudioPress, WooThemes, Thesis), and there are the underclass (ThemeForest, etc.), selling their themes for significantly less than the market leader. The split DID happen. And BTW, a good portion of sales for a premium theme site is the multi-use package, which usually does run $100-$200 per sale. » Posted By Nathan Rice On February 27, 2009 @ 9:55 AMComments Posted By Nathan Rice
OK, you got me there :-) I guess I should have said …
Unfortunately, anyone and everyone can and does claim their theme is SEO’d, and there’s no real way to tell if they’re feeding your a load of BS or not, unless you actually know what good SEO looks like.
You get all that google search traffic using the same techniques you are decrying in this post! It’s just that Justin (the author of Hybrid) did it for you instead of you doing it consciously.
1. Your doctitle sums up what this post is about with the post title. (could be optimized)
2. The H1 tag is wrapped around this post’s title, not around the site title.
3. Your content comes before your sidebar in the document flow.
4. Your markup structure is logical and semantic. (doc size could be optimized)
5. You use breadcrumbs.
wpazo.com is a great resource too, don’t shortsell that puppy. Lots of good links to useful resources. But I’m with you. Google is the first place I go when I want to find something. The creme always rises to the top (of the SERPs).
I’m fairly certain that you and Matt were cut from the same cloth. :-)
The question bloggers will always ask themselves is, “does this help me?”
If a WP user wants to learn about WordPress, you won’t do well just studying the Codex. It probably won’t work for you. You need to be proactive. Follow WP developers on Twitter. Subscribe to their blogs. Buy their products. Study their code. That’s how I learned.
“The GPL is explicit about what constitutes a derivative work”
2. Non-compiled code is pretty much impossible to GPL.
WordPress uses PHP arrays, and loops over those arrays to produce an output. Because WordPress is GPL, and uses arrays and loops, every use of an array and loop must be GPL.
http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/9015
like I said, I was definitely off on the high end price points. iThemes has set a universal price point of $80 single and $150 mulit use. But my point about the upper and lower class separation holds true, mostly.
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I have to disagree with your assessment of my prediction. While I was definitely wrong about the specific price points, my overall point has definitely come true. This time last year, everybody and their brother was selling premium themes. But a year later, and the men have been separated from the boys. The creme has risen to the top, as it were.