Once again, I want to tell you to not blindly trust theme authors when they say their theme is SEO friendly. “SEO friendly” is just a label they put on their theme and since most of their customers don’t know what to look for to see if it’s actually true, yet know that it’s important, it helps “sell” themes.
Sounds like he’s describing me and I bet a lot of other people as well. Overall, good advice from Joost de Valk with a little bit of self promotion at the end.
There’s no link to the article you quoted?
He makes a good point though I agree that the whole post sounded very self promotional.
“StudioPress first hired me and later on my good friend Greg Boser of BlueGlass, one of the best SEOs in the world, to make sure their themes were SEO friendly. They, unlike others, have earned the right to say their themes are SEO friendly.”
He’s completely right ! Almost every theme will say SEO friendly, once I get them out of the box they are a disappointment. I guess that’s why almost everyone downloads a SEO plugin, to make up for the poor themes.
I’d have given other examples if I knew of any :-) I could also have written a flaming rant against the specific theme creator, but that would have been unfair too.
From Joost’s post on his blog: “I’ve since emailed the theme authors and they’re taking action to fix it, so there’s no reason for me to name them here, …”
Really? By linking to the blog in question you actually very clearly named them. “View source” is not exactly rocket science and the type of people that read your blog know exactly how to do that.
Thanks for making other authors aware though of this sort of issue though. I generally tend to leave SEO to plugins and code my themes with the proper heading tags and do as much as possible to make the code lightweight. So far it’s worked out fine.
@Hyder: First of all you have to do something to find out. Second: now I won’t rank for their name with negative stuff.
@Joost de Valk – Yes, clearly you’ve put a lot of work behind your SEO plugin, I use it myself, I personally think you could’ve used more tact here.
Your post also helps you “sell” your services by showing how you saved a blog, albeit at the expense of pointing out someone else by linking to the blog in question. The theme author himself responded on your blog too.
I think you guys are being a little rough on Joost. He contributes a lot to the WordPress community via plugins and informative blog posts, therefore he should not be downgraded for slightly pitching his services.
And yes, I am a huge advocate of Genesis and while I do not use their built in SEO features, I do think it is an awesome framework.
Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.
SEO can be a challenge when dealing with all this info. A bit off topic, but I mean there’s just so much out there. I have trouble figuring out who to listen to.