Thesis &/or Platinum SEO WP Plug-in?!

[rbowen]

I know just enough about SEO to be dangerous so I gotta ask for some advice:

I bought Thesis because a "friendly acquaintance" who is a bit of an expert with Thesis encouraged me to, with the promise he'd tutor me on using it. But be seems to have fallen off the planet ... incommunicado for a while now.

So I decided to install the Platinum SEO WP Plug-in, as an alternative to the All-in-One SEO WP Plug-in. (I think that was a good choice .. was it?)

Anyway, my question is ... With all that this Platinum SEO plug-in can apparently do for me SEO-wise, what more would Thesis be able to do for me ... or would Thesis do the same things, only better or easier and/or give me a better looking theme in the process?

Or maybe it's not an "either/or"? Maybe I should use both ... or would they conflict and get things screwed up?

Thanks,
Richard

[learnmore]

Thesis gives you lot of options SEO-wise right out of the box. I wouldn't install any of those plugins you mentioned. If you have started to play with thesis, you must have seen the options it gives you for each post, image, pages etc, why duplicate the efforts and confuse wordpress?

[rbowen]

Sounds reasonable. But I haven't yet started to play around with Thesis yet. I'll probably start watching some of the tutorials next week and try installing my 1st theme a la Thesis.

I take it that I should deactivate the Platinum SEO plug-in, first, though ... right?

I'm not very "technical", so I hope I can figure it out. But if not, I can always switch to some other theme and re-activate the Platinum SEO plug-in, I guess.

Richard

[db8]

Yup, de-activate Platinum SEO otherwise you'll likely have a double up of your meta SEO tags.

Going through the Thesis tutorials is a great idea. To be honest it may seem a little overwhelming at first given how powerful it is, but once you learn how to work with it your life becomes SO MUCH easier!

[kiloh]

The thesis theme is a great them, I highly recommend it for anybody struggling with SEO or just wants the easy way to do things.

[jazbo]

Or tweak a free theme and install the yoast SEO plugin.

[Drewry_Media]

your best bet before installing plug ins on your server is to

a) focus on your WordPress theme

b) focus on your blog content & making sure it's unique and worthwhile for readers to enjoy

c) focus on getting natural links from relevant blogs and sites

d) post often

e) watch some of those plug ins; some developers install code on them that you can't delete off of your server, so that they can permanenetly gain a backlink from you, whether you use the plug in or not.

f) have faith. this is NOT an overnight process. but, if you have patience, you will succeed!

g) Hope this helps =)

h) wish you the best , playa! (smile)

[bgmacaw]

Originally Posted by rbowen

I bought Thesis because a "friendly acquaintance" who is a bit of an expert with Thesis encouraged me to, with the promise he'd tutor me on using it. But be seems to have fallen off the planet ... incommunicado for a while now.

Let me guess, you bought it through his affiliate link. That great affiliate commission is why Thesis is so highly rated and why people resort to trickery to get people to click their link.

As for your question about possible conflicts, it would require digging through the code for Thesis and Platinum SEO to determine if there would be a problem. In other cases, I have seen conflict between SEO featured themes and Platinum/All-in-One so I think it's pretty likely that there will be a conflict at some point. I'd recommend only using Thesis since you already have it. It does a sufficient job at optimizing on-site factors although it isn't the SEO Nirvana that commission seekers tout it to be.

[Canonical]

Originally Posted by rbowen

I know just enough about SEO to be dangerous so I gotta ask for some advice:

I bought Thesis because a "friendly acquaintance" who is a bit of an expert with Thesis encouraged me to, with the promise he'd tutor me on using it. But be seems to have fallen off the planet ... incommunicado for a while now.

So I decided to install the Platinum SEO WP Plug-in, as an alternative to the All-in-One SEO WP Plug-in. (I think that was a good choice .. was it?)

Anyway, my question is ... With all that this Platinum SEO plug-in can apparently do for me SEO-wise, what more would Thesis be able to do for me ... or would Thesis do the same things, only better or easier and/or give me a better looking theme in the process?

Or maybe it's not an "either/or"? Maybe I should use both ... or would they conflict and get things screwed up?

Thanks,
Richard

I have 4 blogs running Thesis. There is no need for SEO plugins with Thesis. The Admin screens expose pretty much anything of use from an SEO perspective.

Thesis is a VERY professional theme (and very SEO friendly) out of the box. And if you know HTML/CSS well, you should be able to customize it to almost any "look and feel" you want. But you have to understand how to use hooks to do so.

Sugarrae.com (Rae Hoffman's) site has some good posts about using hooks and customizing Thesis:

Thesis Tutorial – Hooks for Dummies
Thesis Tutorial – Customizing the 404 Page
Thesis Tutorial – Creating Custom Categories
Thesis Tutorial – Advanced Ad Targeting

The guy who wrote Thesis Openhook plugin (Rick Beckman) has a good video or two on his site which will give you some insite:

http://rickbeckman.org/thesis-openhook/

And this site shows you which position on the blog page is controlled by each hook (great resource so bookmark it):

Thesis Hooks | A Visual Reference

My Thesis blogs use two plugins... Thesis Openhooks and Akismet. That theme rocks out of the box. It looks very professional and the CSS is excellent (not buggy like lots of other WP themes, even other premium themes).