Comment on WordPress SEO Theme Reviews by Stuart Wider.
It looks like your newsletter has stirred some passions in Heatmap theme members at the prospect of $500 for xmas ;) lol
First up, thanks for noting that HeatMap Theme is indeed an ads theme, and yes you are right I don’t advertise it as an SEO theme per se, instead opting for a common sense simple SEO strategy that can be easily built upon.
Secondly, you have some valid points about the particular way creativitypro.com itself is set up… but creativitypro is just one example of how HeatMap Theme can be set up.
Heatmap theme is very flexible with its options and can be set up in lots of different ways for SEO benefit.
I actually popped into creativitypro.com this morning and ticked a few options, which addressed the majority of things that you noted. I designed Heatmap theme this way as many users have divergent ideas about what is good SEO (as most of us do) ;)
I’ll address each point you make about creativitypro.com and relate that back to how heatmaptheme itself can be configured…
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1. Using Home as the anchor text for the home page links, basic SEO mistake to use Home, Click Here etc… for anchor text.
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Heatmap theme implements the WordPress menu manager that was new with wp3. You can actually have your links named anything you like in the navigation bars… so if someone feels the can get better seo benefit by changing the names they can
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2. The read more links, the anchor text is not SEO’d as above.
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Read more text is fully customisable using special custom fields in Heatmaptheme. If someone wants to SEO their more links they can do that in Heatmap theme
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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.
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Heatmap theme actually has lots of different configurations for the H1 tag and where it is placed. I just activated the featured page option and now creativitypro.com has a H1 tag on the home page. There are also switches in the theme to place
the h1 in other places, including the new SEO text feature which enable you if you wish to place a h1 directly below the tag but also style with CSS so you can move it inline with the page content itself.
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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.
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Some people like this strategy, some people might have different ideas. Seems to work for me. If someone really wants to change this behaviour its pretty easy to do with a few theme edits.
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5. This is the big one, SEO damaging. Uses nofollow attributes on links for comment author names. Nofollow deletes PR/link 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.
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Well done on persuading WordPress devs to change this. Until WP 3 comes out If someone is concerned about this default WordPress feature there are plugins to assist.
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6. Uses a H2 header for the title of the post, should use a H1. H1 isn’t used at all! Basic SEO mistake, Talian theme better SEO’d.
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See point 3. H1 one tags have lots of options in Heatmap theme.
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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 features list).
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I prefer to place the post title first, site tagline second, and sitename third, as I feel the first part gets the SEO benefit, but the tagline and sitename give the Search Engine results context for real human visitors, when they are scanning
results returned. Thats SVO, search visitor optimisation ;) Again works for me.
If others feel thats not for them, editing a few lines will fix that up (and of course Heatmap theme members often ask me for little edits for all sorts of things, and if a request is within reason, I’m only too happy to give them a few tips or a code snippet or two to tune the theme to their liking.
I note that both our themes rank well in the adsense search space ;) We must both be doing something right :)
I do commend you on your work on creating an SEO theme, and of course, theme authors and bloggers look to other like yourself for the latest thinking about the subject.
Feel free to drop me a line via email. It would be great to connect up for some theme author geek talk ;)
