Comment on WordPress SEO Theme Reviews by SEO Dave.

Stallion Responsive SEO Theme WordPress HeatMap Theme vs Talian SEO Theme Comparison.

Two people in two hours making the same claim about the HeatMap theme. Am I missing something?

This is just a few of the HeatMap theme SEO failings, I only need to find one for Talian 05 to be better.

HeatMap example site linked from their home page

SEO mistakes.

1. Using Home as the anchor text for the home page links, basic SEO mistake to use Home, Click Here etc… for anchor text. Talian theme better search engine optimized.

2. The read more links, the anchor text is not SEO’d as above.

3. No H1 header used on home page. We generally want SERPs on our home pages, for example the title of the site. Talian theme better search engine optimized.

4. Sidebar menus use headers (H4) for the headings, yes we want to highlight them a bit bigger, but don’t use a H4 (any header), use CSS. Talian theme better SEO’d.

5. This is the big one, SEO damaging. Uses nofollow attributes on links for comment author names. Nofollow deletes PR/link benefit, this is a BIG NO, NO, we no longer use nofollow on anything. Talian removes all nofollow links except those added to the Reply to comment links (I’ve recently persuaded WordPress development to fix that problem in WordPress 3.1, currently in beta) and links in the body of comments (I’m still working on that problem). Again, Talian theme better search engine optimized.

Didn’t even have to look past that sites home page to find those basic 101 SEO errors.

Quick look at a post.

6. Uses a H2 header for the title of the post, should use a H1. H1 isn’t used at all! Basic SEO 101 mistake, Talian theme better SEO’d.

7. Possible SEO mistake. Title element is built with the format: “Title of Post | Site Title” which is not best SEO wise. If you can set it to only “Title of Post” then it’s not an SEO mistake (didn’t check the HeatMap site for SEO features list).

I think my $500 is safe with regards the HeatMap theme.

In the HeatMap themes defense on the home page it doesn’t advertise itself as an SEO theme per se (which Talian 05 is). It has one line:

“SEO Ready – HeatMap Theme has a common sense SEO strategy built right in so that you can get the maximum Google love that your blog deserves.”

HeatMap is an ad theme, not an SEO theme. I can see they have tried to SEO the themes code, for example not having a H1 header for the title of the site on Post pages, but it’s not gone that one step further of realising you need a H1 on the home page (title of site) and a H1 on post pages (title of Post).

In comparison if I advertised Talian as the best ad theme it wouldn’t be true, Talian does a very good job at providing my customers with ad based systems to their WordPress sites, but I wouldn’t argue it’s the best. I can see on the HeatMap home page a few features I’d like to add to Talian to make it better ad wise.

David