How can the Thesis theme for Wordpress help with your website’s SEO?

Cartoon by Hugh MacLeod

Recently my He Said, She Said co-host, Todd Schnick, asked me if Thesis helps with SEO for blogs and other websites.

He’s been monitoring the Alexa rank of blogs and other sites he frequents and had noticed that the sites built using the Thesis theme had noticeably lower Alexa ranks than others.

Since I am an affiliate for Thesis I felt like a complete idiot for not knowing the answer; in fact, I had never even given it any thought.

DUH.

So, I did a little research and came across this blog post which explains that, in fact, “The SEO reason to buy Thesis is also clear – it rocks.”

The author explains the SEO benefits of the Thesis theme.

“The arrival and growth of Thesis has presented novice bloggers, designers, and enthusiasts with the single most powerful and intuitive SEO tool to date. It’s an extension of building content that helps your content get “found” by searchers.

Thesis, properly used, allows everyone a chance to maximize their visibility, traffic, and online brand presence. This has been proven, time and again, by myriad users of the theme, experts and “newbies” alike.

At the time of this writing, self-hosted WordPress 2.7.x and Thesis 1.4.x are the current best-practice method to leverage Thesis fully. Self-hosted means having your own domain [www.yourdomain.com] along with PHP5 and mySQL.

Hosting on WordPress or other “free” sites can work at a rudimentary level, but not to full advantage. As that gets into off-page SEO, we’ll ask you to take our word on that.

There are, have been, and will continue to be decent “plug-in” modules that can assist basic WordPress themes in allowing for varying amounts of SEO control by the end user (that would be you).

So. Why should you buy Thesis, which presently costs either $87 for a single domain or $164 for the “every domain I personally own” developer membership option?

A number of reasons.

While we focus here on how to use Thesis and SEO to grow traffic, subscribers, and organic search rankings, Thesis is also – unlike plugins – a highly flexible design theme that offers users limitless capability to create “unrecognizable” versions of the default Thesis construct.

These customizations are unaffected by updating versions, as they are maintained in a folder specifically intended for this purpose.”

To learn more you can read the entire blog post – which includes a basic yet thorough Thesis SEO tutorial – here.