Thesis Tutorial - Overview of the Thesis Theme for WordPress SEO Tools

This member asks for an overview of all of the SEO elements within Thesis. We all know that Thesis is the smartest SEO theme in existence. In this video I discuss all of the tools that Thesis affords. We start off by looking at the Document Head section of Thesis Site Options. Next we look at all of the "on page" SEO tools for posts and pages. Then we review the SEO tools for category and tag archives and custom taxonomies.
Visit our website at http://www.byobwebsite.com/ for more video tutorials on building and customizing your own Thesis themed WordPress website.

Transcript
Sandy: My question is about the SEO options in Thesis that...
Rick: Oh yeah.
Sandy: What have you been using in turning on and not turning on and using robots and that kind of thing.
Rick: Okay so you know, the whole Thesis SEO thing starts off with site options. And the first element of Thesis SEO shows up in the document head here. I never use this but if you wanted to add something, essentially your site name, to all of your page titles you could do that right here. So if you selected this and left that little separator, then what would happen is your page title would come first and then there would be this separator and then would be your site title. I don't think it's good practice so I don't do that but you could do that.
Then you have your robots meta tags and though the whole purpose for the robots meta tags is mainly to reduce or eliminate the possibility of duplicate content. So for example your No Index tag, this is how I have it set up. I don't bother indexing subpages, I only edit them and I only index posts, pages, and category archive pages. Otherwise, I don't index anything else. You can... and that's just because of the way the organizational structure of my site. I have a site that's very heavily weighted on categories and if I had categories and tags selected a given post would be indexed under Category page and then under several tag pages because each post can have more than 1 tag. And there's a possibility or probability of a certain amount of duplicate content. So I just use category pages.
And then the No Follow, I do the same thing essentially. I leave a no follow on for sub pages and I leave the no follow on for category pages but I put the no follow on all the rest. Obviously the rationale is that all of my content is getting indexed anyway. I don't need to index it by tag and index it by author and index it by page. It's good enough for me to have it indexed by category.
Again, no archive -- I don't bother with no archive at all. I let them archive whatever page they want to archive which is actually something good for me. You know, if they archive my page then it's easier if there's some problem with my site for somebody to see the content.
And then the directory tags, I say yes to both of those and that just gives me more control over what my title tag says.
And then again on this same thing, you have the Canonical URLs. We've got this canonical URL situation where you can have a page that is www.mysite.com/mypage and then it can also just be mysite.com/mypage and actually, with longer URLs... there can be many different potential URLs to get you to the same page. The canonical URL tells everybody what the right URL to use is and tries to keep all that straight so I always select on this. And that wraps up the document head.
Then you have this homepage SEO and it's important to understand what homepage SEO is referring to here. This home page is actually the blog page and so if you don't have a static front page, you don't actually have a way, besides this, of putting a title tag and a meta description and index information for that page. So if you have a standard blog configuration, this is where you put the title and the meta title in for your main page. So this is a very important spot for somebody who uses WordPress in a normal blog configuration. If you use WordPress in a page with a static front page, then it's a different story.
For the lesson and full video transcript visit: http://www.byobwebsite.com/answers/seo-elements-of-the-thesis-theme/

Category:

Education

Tags:

• SEO
• Thesis SEO
• Meta Description Tag
• Meta Title Tag
• tutorial