I’ve talked about how much I love Thesis, but here’s a reason that doesn’t usually come up in first conversations: Thesis means I don’t have to use a bunch of plugins. Why does this matter? Because each plugin is one more bit of overhead that runs when your blog serves up content, and it’s one more piece of infrastructure to keep maintained and up to date.
Thesis contains so many great features built into the theme that these plugins aren’t needed:
- All in One SEO Pack – features a wide variety of SEO options, most of which are built into Thesis.
- Ultimate Noindex Nofollow Tool – this plugin lets you improve your blog’s search rankings by “noindexing” pages of your choice (such as archives, categories, tag pages, and so on). Thesis has all of these options built in.
- Feed Locations – using Feedburner or otherwise want to give your blog visitors an alternate feed URL? You can do it with this plugin, or you can do it with Thesis.
- Google Analytics – this plugin will insert your Google Analytics script (or you could manually edit your theme files), or you can simply paste the script in through Thesis’ admin screen.
- Post Teaser – generates a preview/teaser of a post, with a link to go to the full post. This is a built-in feature of Thesis that can be configured any number of ways.
- Multi-level Navigation Plugin – adds multi-level navigation menus to WordPress. Thesis implements this same functionality using WordPress’ nested pages features.
By not running six separate plugins, my site has a reduced overhead and maintenance load. Couple these with Thesis‘ other killer features (including font face, size, and color formatting without touching any code) and I really do think that Thesis is a great way to make blogging easier.
These other posts might be of interest to you:
I’ve blogged previously about why I think Thesis is the best WordPress theme. The folks at DIY Themes just released Thesis 1.6, a new version that adds some incremental updates along with some really nice new design and customization features.
Thesis has always offered menu-driven customization for things such as number of columns and the navigation menu, but with Thesis 1.6 they’ve extended the point-and-click customization to new things such as color schemes – you no longer need to edit a custom CSS file for many design changes on a Thesis website.
Check out this video to learn more about what you can do with Thesis 1.6:
(if you’re viewing this in a feed reader and don’t see the video, click through to the website)
If you already have Thesis, the new version is a free upgrade. If you don’t have it… head over to the Thesis website to learn more and get the theme. I promote the heck out of Thesis (and I have an affiliate relationship with the company) because it’s a really great theme that can provide huge benefits for a blogger without much effort.
These other posts might be of interest to you:
Over the past month or so, I’ve posted several articles related to web statistics and what they mean. Let’s take a look at an important referrer-related bit of information: inbound search links. These identify the terms that visitors are putting into search engines and then finding your site. For example, if one searches for Portland wedding photography, gets a page of search results and then clicks on a link to Gabriel Boone Photography, the web statistics for the Gabriel Boone Photography site will note that someone arrived via a search for Portland wedding photography.
Pay attention to the search terms that people are using to find your site. Some of them might be expected, but odds are that you’ll find some search terms that might be outside of what you planned. That’s not a bad thing; it can actually be an eye-opener to some topics that you should address more frequently or in more detail.
In the opposite scenario, you might find a lack of referrers coming from search terms that you’re expecting. If you focus on senior pictures in Seattle, ideally your site will be listed when people search for senior pictures Seattle. If it’s not, that’s when you’ll want to look at doing a bit of search engine optimization (SEO). A good place to start might be my short article on SEO and keywords, or view all posts here tagged as SEO-related.
We’ve tied together web statistics and SEO. They are two separate areas that a web publisher should address. Web statistics give a view into your site’s current performance and popularity, while SEO can help you gain more traffic from people who are performing web searches.
Next week, we’ll look at a few more advanced SEO topics that go beyond simple keywords and links.
Photo by David Trowbridge, used under Creative Commons licensing
These other posts might be of interest to you:
If you’re new here, you can keep up with my latest photography information at Picture Pundit – subscribe to my newsletter for a FREE Report: A Guide to Twitter for Photographers.
Last time we talked search engine optimization (SEO), we talked about how keywords relate to SEO. Today let’s take a look at links (the HTML anchor <a> tag) and how they factor into ranking on Google and other search engines.
Links matter for a couple different reasons. The first is the general assumption that the more different sites which are linking to your work, the more useful it must be. As a content creator, there’s no single way to get your work noticed and linked, but it’s good to keep in mind that the more links you get, the more likely that Google, Bing, and other search engines are to rank your site higher in results.
The other thing to know about links is that the text used for the link (between the <a> tags) matters. In general, it is preferable to have the link text be the keywords or phrase that is on-topic for your website. For example, if you’re a wedding photographer in Boston, your potential clients are likely to search for “boston wedding photographer” and having inbound links using that phrase would be excellent for your search ranking.
This matters in a couple scenarios. When creating links internal to your own website, use descriptive words for your links (for example, at the beginning of this post I linked up “keywords relate to SEO”). Don’t just link to “gallery”, but link to your “Denver wedding photography gallery” or such. Outside of your own site, when you’re leaving a message on a forum or a comment on a blog and you’re linking to something on your site, use appropriate keywords in that case as well. Don’t link to “tips”, but link to your “best Flickr tips” – see the difference there?
Don’t be spammy. Don’t use keywords or links that don’t naturally fit into the flow of the message you’re posting. Nobody wants to see someone show up only to promote their own work. If it makes sense in the context of the message to leave a keyword-loaded link, go right ahead, but if it doesn’t read like a natural sentence, you’re probably crossing the line.
Have any other great tips for SEO and links? Leave a comment below…
Photo by *clairity*, used under Creative Commons licensing
These other posts might be of interest to you:
If you’re new here, you can keep up with my latest photography information at Picture Pundit – subscribe to my newsletter for a FREE Report: A Guide to Twitter for Photographers.
If you start publishing content on the internet through a website or blog, one of the terms you’ll come across fairly quickly is SEO. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it’s an area that should get some attention from every blogger or content creator.
Search engines such as Google and Bing use automated programs to “crawl” the web, indexing web pages. Based on what is found, they deliver search results to folks who are making queries for a particular topic. Search Engine Optimization is the practice of ensuring that your website or blog is displaying content in a manner which makes it easy for search engines to find and using methods so that your website will rank higher for the terms you want.
We’ll be exploring a few basic SEO techniques over the next few weeks. A good place to start is to talk about keywords. Keywords are the words or phrases that you expect people to use when searching, so you’ll want to use those words and phrases on your blog. A great first step is to make sure that your blog post titles (and the title for the blog itself) contain keywords. Sometimes there is a tradeoff between a vague and enticing headline to draw readers in vs. one that contains keywords for long-term search results.
Another place where keywords can boost ranking is in the post URLs themselves. Using keywords as part of the post’s permalink (such as /tweet-photos-smugmug-twitter/) will boost the ranking over a generic URL such as post_id=123.
There’s a couple basic SEO keyword tips for you… next time we talk SEO we’ll talk a bit about how keywords relate to tags (of the HTML variety).
These other posts might be of interest to you:
Due to some technical difficulties, this week’s podcast will get rolled into next week’s show. I’m excited to offer up this video however, produced by the folks at Photoshelter. In addition to their great photo hosting services, they produce a variety of resources to help photographers grow business. Here’s a great introduction to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Photographers:
Find out more about Photoshelter’s services if you’re looking for top-notch photo management including print and product orders, e-commerce, and electronic image delivery and licensing. Use the links in this article to receive up to $30 off if you sign up for a new Photoshelter account.
These other posts might be of interest to you:
