Midway Review of Thesis for WordPress, Part One

Once I got over the frustration of creating the header and footer, I began to poke around some more with the site. I also checked out the multitude of tutorials scattered around the Internet.

Pages

One of the tutorials showed me how to change the order of my pages with a simple drag-and-drop. That was something I had wanted to do since I first started using WordPress for my blogs. In the beginning, I learned the hard way that I had to plan for the order of my pages before I created them. Otherwise, I was stuck with what I had. While creating new pages for my books yesterday, I discovered that I can not only change the order through the Attributes panel, but you can also create parent and child pages. To take things a step further, you can choose whether or not to display your sidebar on these pages.

To see an example, click on My Books. On the initial page, I created a clickable thumbnail of each of my books, which will take you to a page where you will learn more about them. I no longer have to clutter up my navigation bar, which makes me thrilled!

SEO Features

Today, I wanted to talk about the SEO features, which was one of the things that attracted me to Thesis. A lot of people reported a significant rise in their site visitors after installing the program. However, I experienced a significant drop. As it turns out, several other people experienced the same thing.

The reason this happened was because I had changed my permalinks to display the post name first, followed by the date. I thought all of my old posts would automatically change. When I checked my CPanel stats, I saw a whopping 244 404 error hits! It was no wonder my stats were dipping. I don’t blame this on Thesis because I had changed the permalinks via the SEO Title Tag plugin, which I had mistakenly thought would change all of my post links automatically. Now, I have a lot of cleaning up to do this weekend. As it turns out, that’s a good thing, which I’ll explain later. In the meantime, I wanted to show you how Thesis allows you to optimize your posts so that they do well in the search engines.

This panel allows you to add a custom title tag, meta descriptions, and meta keywords in a very straightforward way. All you have to do is figure out what keywords to use and how you’re going to write your meta description so that it will attract readers as well as boost your search engine rank. One thing that is new to me is the custom title tags. These tags will allow you to override your post title. According to Chris Pearson, the creator of Thesis, this is the most important aspect of SEO because you can optimize these titles for your best keywords, thereby increasing your chances of ranking in the top 5 position of Google for your chosen keyword. I have to admit that I don’t quite understand this concept yet. At the moment, the custom title tag seems redundant. Why not do a good job with writing the post title??

You also have the option to tell the search engines not to index your pages. The only reason I would use the nofollow option is for static pages that don’t see too many changes. So, I don’t see myself using that too often.

As an added bonus, one which I plan to explore soon, is the CSS styling. This feature allows you to style posts individually. Once I figure out how to use this feature efficiently, I’ll write a post about it.

So far, I’m very pleased with how I’ve been able to customize this blog with the Thesis framework. My next post will cover how I customized my sidebar, once I decide how I want to do that.

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