Comment on WordPress SEO Theme Reviews by SEO Dave.

Stallion WordPress SEO Package Glad the Stallion 6.1 upgrade is going well, I finished upgrading my last site today, turns out I have 90 WordPress installations, been underestimating them for a while (thought it was closer to 70). Took me about 2 days to update them all, but this included updating WordPress and a bunch of plugins and customization whilst doing other stuff.

An entire site took about 15 minutes to setup not including uploading Stallion files via FTP, 10 minutes to find an header image online that was big enough (minimum 1000px by 288px) I liked (was a free desktop wallpaper, ~2000px wide), used the new Stallion 2011 header feature (via Appearance >> Header) to upload and crop the image, rest of the time was setting various Stallion options which, probably changed 15 options from the defaults.

My wife who is about as tech savvy as a smoked kipper :-) is complaining I’ve added too many options, to anyone worried about the number of options (~230 not including options related to various built in plugins) is they are almost all optional. When I built Stallion I had my wife in mind so she could use it with minimal input from me :-)

This is one of her newer sites Fun Photography Projects, as Mark said the new Black Stallion colour schemes are good for photo sites. The header image is us messing around with forced photography, we found a small (it was really small, looks big in the photo) wooden chair (falling to bits) in a field and I spent ten minutes in a field jumping in the air to get that photo :-)

Make a basic setup and you are good to go. Add your Stallion activation ID, add your AdSense publisher number (or turn AdSense off if you don’t want ads) and if you only plan to use AdSense that’s it, you get a site not unlike the one you are on now. You can setup widgets like most themes (if you’ve used WordPress before that will be easy). Few minutes of ticking boxes and you can achieve so many different designs with everything search engine optimised (if a feature isn’t either SEO positive or SEO neutral I won’t add it to Stallion) easily. Most of the options include information about what they do, so most features (optional features) are very easy to use and understand, lots of ticking boxes :-)

My youngest son has made quite a few sets of header and banner images at Stallion Theme Custom Banners and Header Images. We’ll be making some larger header images for the new Stallion 2011 header feature.

That’s also a good site to see the new thumbnail features, the archived posts are showing examples of almost all the thumbnail options, Stallion thumbnail set on posts, using a featured image (WordPress core feature), using a YouTube thumbnail screenshot and grabbing an image from the post.

This thumbnail feature sounds complicated, but it’s automated, if you’ve never set a featured image the thumbnail will either be nothing (if no images on a post), thumbnail of an image within the post or a thumbnail of a YouTube video. Want some control set a Stallion thumbnail for each post or a featured image. Timthumb 2 is built into Stallion, Timthumb creates thumbnails from any image on your server, so you can set a 1000px wide Stallion thumbnail and Timbthumb will automatically generate a thumbnail using the sizes you selected on the Stallion options page. The new Stallion thumbnail feature also ties in with the Contextual Related Posts Plugin that can be downloaded from WordPress SEO Plugins, that is as soon as I upload the new Stallion version of the Contextual Related Posts Plugin (made a lot of modifications).

The “Related Articles to Stallion WordPress Theme AdSense Setup” section below uses that plugin and the “Stallion WordPress Theme Chitika Setup” thumbnail is a Stallion thumbnail resized using Timbthumb (all automated). Will get the new version uploaded tomorrow, fixed the issue with the original Contextual Related Posts Plugin generating extra database queries on the home page.

David