Comment on WordPress SEO Theme Reviews by SEO Dave.

Stallion Responsive SEO Theme The people who buy Talian 5 tend to be those who understand SEO and want to make more money online, that’s what Talian 3 and 5 does extremely well.

Note: I didn’t release Talian 4: Talian 3, 4 and 5 are based on Talian 1 which I didn’t design, basically the Talian colour scheme wasn’t mine, the PHP coding is, I can pretty much add this code to any WordPress theme design: your site for example which uses HeatMap has loads of SEO mistakes, I could take the HeatMap look and add my SEO code, it would look like HeatMap, but SEO wise would be like Talian 5. Talian 2 and Talian Reloaded are completely different themes (not mine, completely different code) which complicates matters further.

I wouldn’t call Talian ugly, when I first converted Talian to SEO/AdSense coding I didn’t like it, I preferred one column themes (SEO wise there’s no difference between one and two column themes), but it became the most popular theme on this site, so with limited time for theme development updated Talian first and so far haven’t got around to updating the other themes and the Talian look has grown on me over the last few years :-)

For me when I choose a theme for a site it’s in this order:

SEO, SEO, SEO, Make Money, Make Money, What it Looks Like.

Of the version 3 themes, SEO wise they are all pretty much the same, AdSense wise Talian tended to out perform the others on CTR. Talian 5 is better than all the version 3 themes as there’s new SEO features and generally feature wise it’s better as it’s got a lot more options.

Of course I understand the average user works the other way around, they use a theme because they like the look and worry about the rest later. Like you say they think they can achieve maximum SEO through SEO plugins, which isn’t true. For example in version 6 I’m disabling three of the default WordPress widgets because they are damaging SEO wise (most users won’t know they are SEO damaging).

Theme development isn’t my main business, I’m an SEO consultant and until very recently most of what went into Talian was because I planned to use those features. I had no serious interest in selling thousands of copies of Talian (to be more precise I didn’t have the time to put into marketing themes as a business), it was useful from an SEO perspective etc… to have a small number of users (like Mark) giving feedback on possible features they’d like to see to give me ideas I might not have thought of (developing themes has helped me so much in keeping my SEO skills sharp). If a feature was useful to me or easy to add, I’d add it, but it was never about making a theme that would fit every users needs.

Developing themes was basically a hobby that helped develop my SEO skill set.

That’s very recently changed, had my eyes opened to the possibility of making a lot of money from selling SEO themes (more than I make from selling SEO services, I’d be dumb not to act on a revelation like that :-)) and so you will see a major shift in how I develop WordPress SEO themes from “what do I want in a theme”, to “what do users want from a theme”.

David