Thesis, WordPress, and SEO benefits for my client

[ccschmitz]

A customer of mine is convinced that he wants to use the Thesis WordPress theme (http://diythemes.com/) for a site that I am building him because of the SEO benefits that Thesis boasts. However, I’m skeptical of the benefits and whether I could provide an equally search engine friendly site with my moderate knowledge of SEO. Also, I know Thesis offers all kinds of customizations to the appearance through the admin panel, and I’m not sure if these will get in the way of my custom theme development and even slow me down from my normal WordPress theme design process.

Anyone have any recommendations which way I should persuade my client? I have a lot of experience building WP themes, so I’d prefer to do it from scratch, but perhaps I’m just being stubborn and working with Thesis might actually speed up my build time.

Looking forward to your thoughts!

Thanks,
Chris

[JaredAM]

Humm, I doubt that Thesis is the SEO magic bullet, there’s only so much a theme can do when content is king.

However, if the customer wants it then I’d simply explain that SEO’ing a theme is pretty easy and your themes are as SEO friendly as Thesis (maybe point out similarities/differences and how those things affect SEO).

If he still persists, then let him buy the theme but explain to him that there may be design overhead in order for your design to fully integrate with their custom theme functions.

[ccschmitz]

Jared,

Yeah, that’s kind of what I figured…. I’ll look over the code of some sites using thesis vs. some of my previous builds and see what I find. Unless I know way less than I realize about SEO, I just don’t see how it could provide many, if any, benefits.

Thanks a lot for the advice! It helps a lot and I’ll try to report back what ends up happening.

[Author]

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