Thesis or Genesis for doing local SEO?

The reason a lot of people recommend Genesis is that it is very flexible and more importantly quite fast.

No, they're typical blog themes.




My own hand edited themes.




You can, just do your own editing.



Here's a word of advice. Your on an IM forum both theme frameworks have affiliates. Don't believe everything you read especially If it's coming from an affiliate. Their goal is to make money, If you don't buy what they suggest they don't make money.

Keep in mind I'm not knocking either theme they're probably both useful If you know your way around them. Neither one is magic, neither one will rank your pages for you. You'll be doing some work to rank pages.

Don't take this the wrong way but I've noticed in your last couple of SEO forum threads, I get the feeling your looking for ranking pages with very little work. That's not going to happen with SEO.

I'm not sure why there's so many people worried about page speed here lately. Page speed is nothing new & it's defiantly not at the top of the list for ranking pages.

Don't get me wrong, nobody wants a page that takes all day to load but it's mostly common sense. There's no need to keep checking how fast a page loads, tweaking, checking, tweaking, checking...

Here's a tip for Wordpress themes, look for themes with as small as a zip file size as possible while still fitting your needs. Things like bloated fancy looking animated webpages will slow down loading times & be overkill for traffic, avoid those types of themes which weeds out the majority of premium/paid WP themes.

Minimal themes are best & also can help keep traffic focused on your call to actions.

Also only use plugins when absolutely necessary. Some plugins bloat the finished HTML source code which is what Google & traffic will be looking at.

I liked Thesis up until version 2.0. That thing is a nightmare to work with.

Genesis is great. Simple and has some decent SEO options as part of the package to manage stuff like canonical tags, no indexing archives and authors (if you choose to), etc.

Genesis also has a lot of great child themes available. You can make something that looks good without major programming headaches. Some of the child themes are going to add a little more bloat to the code, but there are some good ones.

I also like Headway Theme. Pretty easy to customize the crap out of if you know a little bit of coding.

They are better than your typical out of the box theme, but there is nothing magical about them.

I've never had Thesis but recently moved to Genesis.

Out of the box it's a very fast loading theme. I have W3 Total Cache installed on a brand new lease site I'm building using a CDN and it's looking very fast. GT Metrix is giving it 2 A's with both of them in the high 90's.

No doubt the speed will come down a bit after I install Visual Composer and start loading up the content. I've never used it and am curious to see how it's going to affect the speed.

I use the save for web function in Photoshop to scrunch my images down to the point where they're on the verge of degrading before I load them up.

I like my sites to be as fast as possible because it's easy to do. And with my lack of experience I need every edge possible

The framework has nothing to do with SEO. If you using WordPress, you can pick any decent properly coded theme with clean interface and it will work perfectly for you.

The people who suggested the above names might just be affiliated with them.

A good web framework must generally be fast, robust and extensible.

Here is a list of popular and free content management systems:

1. WordPress (PHP-based CMS).
2. Django (Python-based CMS).
3. Plone (Python-based Framework).
4. Joomla (PHP-based CMS).
5. Drupal (PHP-based CMS).
6. Radiant (Ruby on Rails based CMS).

Hope that helps!

Yukon nailed it. All these flashy frameworks with hooks, in-built seo etc etc are okay, but all you need is a clean theme with not much of junk code, like default wordpress themes and you're good to go.

As an SEO theme developer when I see a theme advertised as SEO friendly I check what their SEO features are (can copy them :-)) and they tend not to be SEO friendly and have no real SEO features.

For those who use Thesis or Genesis what SEO features are they actually offering?

I've looked at a lot of Thesis and Genesis driven sites and there's nothing special about them. About the only SEO features which could have a ranking benefit are:

Manipulate title tag : could improve rankings
Manipulate description tag : won't improve rankings, but could increase click through rate.

The above can be achieved with almost any theme and any of the WordPress SEO plugins which have the option for adding unique titles and descriptions.

We then have lots of potentially damaging features like noindex, nofollow.

For basic theme optimization since Genesis and Thesis are parent themes and webmasters use child themes, you are reliant on the creator of the child theme to understand SEO.

If they don't understand things like you shouldn't put your site name in a H1 header sitewide you'll not have optimized H1 headers on posts and categories. Or you should avoid using poorly optimized anchor text for the first link to a resource your internal links will be poorly optimized. They also tend to be VERY heavy on using javascript features like jquery which have a page speed** impact.

** Run some sites using Thesis and Genesis thorough tools like PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix | Website Speed and Performance Optimization and you'll find they tend not to be optimized for speed.

5+ years ago when most themes had their title tags fixed with the format "Name of Site" >> "Post Title" you could argue themes that didn't do this had an SEO feature, but today it's so easy to manipulate the title tags this should be part of every theme. There's nothing about Thesis or Genesis that in 2014 you'd consider them SEO themes and there's a lot you can achieve SEO wise with a theme.

David

Well, thankfully, most people realize that SEO is about more than just site speed and manipulating titles.

I'm using Genesis for my two of blog. Genesis is really SEO friendly and anyone can easily their site keyword rank higher with this.

Anything is SEO friendly if you do it right. Instead of trying to decide which to use based on what SEO benefit it has, focus on what you, as a user, would prefer to use.

Page speed is important because, as mentioned here, no one wants to wait an eternity for a page to load. As long as your load isn't ridiculously slow though, the aesthetics of the theme will be far more important.

For the record I'm using Genesis, but it's more because I'm pretty much the worst dev in the world.

TL;DR pick whichever you think looks best.

I had a friend who was working as an intern on search team.
Was once told me that there are too many ways Google ranks a page.
on of the ways is to look at the platform being used.
Premium frameworks like Thesis and Genesis would definitely give some benefit.
If not anything else, they are most neatly coded themes which minimize the chances of getting your site lose rankings.

Ah joy. I love when people wage war, but they don't really have solid information. Instead they wave their job title around. I'm always happy to be proven wrong, because when I'm proven wrong I learn something.

OP, you can mostly ignore the people telling you to beware that you're on an IM forum so every one will tell you that the product they are affiliated with is best. I haven't seen a single link in the entire forum (the way the affiliate people would make money).

I'm going to recommend Thesis, but will admit I have not used Genesis. I believe Thesis has SEO benefits, but I'm not talking about direct SEO benefits. And I don't believe that a theme that has good SEO will help rank your site faster. It will clean up the loose ends to some extent.

Thesis has 4 CSS files which I think is pretty reasonable. One for responsiveness, one for the main styling, one for custom CSS and I don't remember the fourth. The difference though is that they automatically combine these into one for you. You still edit the original files though. Three requests down. I installed a third-party skin and it had just a few PNG files which I compressed by 50% to save additional KB.

Less plugins. Thesis offers 'boxes' which essentially add themselves to the existing code. Some of them may have the odd JS files, I'm not sure for the individual boxes. Less plugins means less requests. If you want to really test your plugins use a plugin called P3 Plugin Profiler. It loads your site and gives you the load impact time for every single plugin.

I believe Thesis already has Google+ Authorship, and markup integrated.

Page speed in my opinion is a very big factor. Not just as one magical factor, but the domino effect it has. A faster loading site has flow on effects to the bounce rate, time on site, etc. I read an interesting article that claimed that Walmart made a 1% profit increase for every 100 milliseconds their site loaded quicker. I'm not validating that fact, feel free to do some research if you like.

Oh, and Thesis also uses variables in their main CSS sheet. I think it's dumb they don't use it in their Custom CSS though. This makes the code even smaller because you can reference a chunk of code multiple times with just the variable.

The downside to Thesis is it's a lot of hard work. You need to be able to use something like FireBug for Firefox and edit CSS code. Plus, because they change the fundamental foundations of the program the third party training is often out of date.

When we first looked at Thesis it was all the rage but the guy that codes my sites hated it at first but we now have many sites running it.

As for ranking or more importantly profitability it has been sites that are non wordpress based that have done better for us but maybe that was because of the content on them and the sales they generate so therefore the greater effort we put into sending paid traffic.

As for CMS based sites we've had best results with Opencart but the sites where we have Thesis running sort of serve different purposes.

It is a bit like you have all these tools or weapons at your disposal or much like a particular lure I use for fishing. The more you have faith in the lure, weapon or framework the more you use it and then you become a convert to the paradigm.

Try different things.

I would suggest that spending more time on developing quality content and then building assets around the content is more important than the theme or CMS or anything else.

If you do enough work across numerous traffic driving sources you can achieve great results with many different platforms so I suggest you think along the lines of focussing on what is inside your control rather than thinking one theme or framework will be the solution or magic bullet.

Sometimes the biggest successes for us have come through just putting something out there and regardless of SEO, framework, platform or even speed it works.

If you are in a competitive niche however I would suggest speed is important so it really depends on your circumstances as to what will work best for you.