125 140 Sites currently in Slideshow and growing daily….

Click Here to See Full Screen SlideShow

All the sites in this slideshow run on Thesis. To get your own copy of Thesis, hop on over to diyThemes.com and they can hook you up.
If you already own Thesis and have done some customization, please consider submitting your site for inclusion in the Thesis Showcase Gallery.

Okay, so I haven’t had a chance to move over all the sites at the Thesis Showcase gallery. There are currently 470+ sites on display there. Hey! I’m working on it. In fact, if you head on over to the Thesis Gallery, you’ll see some of the changes already. Unfortunately, the Thesis Gallery itself is not built with Thesis, so it’s a bit kludgy to work on. That’s a testimonial for Thesis, it sure makes it hard to work with any other theme once you’ve been exposed to the Thesis Design/Option Interface & Panels.

I expect to have everything in place and updated within the next couple weeks.

In the meantime, you can navigate this slide show in several ways.

• You can do nothing except just watch
• You can change the speed of the slideshow
• Click on the next/previous/pause arrows within the slideshow. (on mouseover)
• Advance using the filmstrip slider on the bottom
• You can watch a full screen slideshow
• If you double click on the slide show or the bulletin board animation on the right, you’ll be taken to a gallery where you can see ALL the sites one page. From there you can view full size images of the respective websites. Too cool for school!

When it is all said and done, I’ll have hyperlinks back to the respective sites and the ability to feature special Thesis customizations.

I saw a post this recently over at Nicholas Reese’s  ArtOfBlog.com. He listed 100+ of his favorite  Thesis websites. What struck me funny was that someone commented that there were too many sample sites listed in his post.

I display  close to 500 Thesis Customizations over at www.ThesisGallery.com and am always thinking it is not enough. I’ve had several comments asking for a better way to display the gallery entries as it was getting a bit unwieldly and people tended not to look at the older gallery entries. I think this will take care of it.

How to Customize Navigation for Thesis Theme with 1.6

There are a ton of new features in Thesis 1.6 , but everyone has been waiting for the all-new drop down navigation menu!

In the following video, Chris Pearson shows you how to set up your new menu and use the new design controls to style your menu.

Note: You’ll need a Thesis License to use version 1.6.  If you don’t have one yet, get on over to www.diythemes.com and they can hook you up.

Resource: Chris Pearson @Pearsonified – from Blip.TV
http://diythemes.com/thesis/

Google Does Not  Use the Keyword Meta Tag

Google is finally telling the world what every seasoned webmaster and Internet Search marketer should already know: The keywords meta tag has no impact whatsoever on how Google’s search engine ranks pages. And even though Google often needs to be somewhat ambiguous when talking about how it ranks pages, the message in today’s blog post is perfectly clear:

“Our web search (the well-known search at Google.com that hundreds of millions of people use each day) disregards keyword metatags completely. They simply don’t have any effect in our search ranking at present.”

Google’s blog post also talks about an imagined clash between two web site owners, Bob and Alice, over Bob’s use of Alice’s business name in his keywords tag and copying of other words from her keywords tag. Although Google doesn’t mention actual companies and doesn’t reference a specific lawsuit, the video that accompanies the blog post does mention lawsuits that involve the keywords tag and Google’s search rankings.

About the keywords meta tag, Matt Cutts says:

“It’s really not worth suing someone over because, at least for Google, we don’t use that information in our rankings even the least little bit.”

This is old news and most people know that just putting the keywords in the keyword meta tag has no effect at all, at least at Google. I guess this confirms it! Yet really the keyword meta tag hasnt been used for like 5 years or more and never really was that big of a factor anyway.

Here’s what Important

• The Title of each page though is very important
• Having solid unique content on all pages
• Links from other websites pointing to your site using the keywords in the anchor text that you want to be ranked on.

Resource: Legal Search Marketing

When creating a business website, one consideration foremost in the developer’s mind is how to make it rank highly with search engines – there is no point in having an internet marketing website if you can’t get traffic to it. The designers of the Thesis WordPress Theme took this into account in determining the number of ways it can be optimized for major search engines.

In the past, themes were not given much importance as a factor in search engine optimization since the process for doing so needed a lot of technical ability. But as more and more websites are being developed, the emphasis on themes and their functionality with regards to SEO has increased proportionally.

So if you are planning to put up a blog, keep in mind the goal of attracting visitors to it through high rankings. An easy first step is to choose a Thesis theme (diythemes.com).
To make the theme of your site work for you, Thesis will ensure it is well-defined and distinct from others. Its built-in features assure it.

More ideas for optimizing your WordPress Business Theme:

1. Research your market before finalizing your keywords. Know the terms that your audience uses and use them. Don’t complicate or confuse them with terms that are more technical than they are used to.

2. Don’t include a great deal of unrelated content – this could cause dilution of the main theme and affect the ‘relevance’ of your site in the eyes of the search engines, thereby influencing the site’s ranking.

3. Getting links from websites whose products or services are similar to yours is still one of the most popular and effective ways to define your blog. When a search engine decides that your links from these websites are relevant and ranks it accordingly, your site will be rewarded with a higher ranking.

On the other hand, links from unrelated sites will see you penalized by the search engines.

Many internet marketers have already identified the benefits of using the SEO powerhouse, Thesis WordPress Theme, and are banking the results. Having a professionally constructed theme as the basis of your site will take the pain out of attracting the search engines.

Resource: http://www.offsite-backup.com.au

http://www.offsite-backup.com.au/blog/web-hosting/thesis-theme-blogs-that-rank-450/

If you have watched the Matt Cutts video from WordCamp San Francisco 2009 you probably noticed his mentioning of the two following HTML codes

1.–google_ad_section_start–
2.–google_ad_section_end–

Most people don’t know about those two tags and so they don’t use them. Using them lets you define what part of your website (or blog) should be used to tell AdSense the kind of ads you want displayed.

For instance, I currently have a teaser on my TechPatio frontpage that mentions a really fast gunman and so my AdSense in the sidebar shows an ad for “gun safety”, even though that’s not really relevant for my tech blog. That was just an example, imagine if you did a post on how to perform better in the search engines and you would like
AdSense to show relevant banners, but because you have a good friend’s link in your blogroll about baby diapers,
AdSense might pick up on that and display an ad for diapers instead – thus you probably don’t get any clicks from webmasters on those ads.

Resource: Klaus www.TechPatio.com

If you have even a tenuous connection with the blogosphere, by now you have probably heard about the Thesis Theme for WordPress.  The Thesis Theme was developed by Chris Pearson who has brought us the very popular Cutline Theme, still the most popular theme at Wordrpress.com

Here’s what I learned from my first projects using Thesis Theme.

The three major selling points for Thesis:

• SEO abilities
• Ease of customization
• Extensive support community.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization):

Thesis fulfills its promise of more effective SEO. After installing Thesis Theme my blog traffic jumped. I made a rookie mistake when buying a domain for my first blog and got the .net version of a domain I later discovered had a .com already (I won’t try and give you the domains of all my websites because I’m not trying to push anything here!). For this blog, once I installed Thesis my site actually started outranking the .com version in Google! My two other blogs are much smaller and sales oriented and neither was making me any money (Literally! The traffic just wasn’t there) until I installed Thesis, and took advantage of the SEO functionality. Of course Thesis isn’t the only reason my traffic jumped, its not a magic bullet, but it makes your SEO efforts much more productive when it comes to being noticed. It definitely makes SEO more user-friendly and lot less tedious.

Customization:

Thesis is pretty good here too. Its simple to customize the way you like, and is great for changing those annoying things you just can’t get right in your free theme. It’s a simple matter of a few clicks to choose the number or layout of columns in your blog, for example, an extremely powerful feature. I used three columns for my .net blog and one column for my two sales blogs and in each case it took less than thirty seconds to set everything out the way I wanted. Other design elements such as colors, header logos, and background pictures/colors can be edited pretty easily too, though they require a bit of text editing. This feature will probably be available in the next version without having to edit (you get free lifetime updates with your purchase anyway).

There are also 350+ examples of Thesis Customizations on display at the Thesis Theme Showcase Gallery.

Support Community/Documentation:

This is where Thesis shines. The support community is fantastic; if you ever have any problem with Thesis you will be able to grab hold of someone in a forum and get help within no time. There isn’t a single great repository of info that I know of, that’s why I put together the design guide so whenever I create a new blog for myself or a client, I can just copy and paste in the design changes I require. The forums are great but I’d rather have clear instructions and work things out myself than have to ask someone, every time I want to set up a change, however nice or knowledgeable they are.

Bottom line, would I recommend Thesis Theme for WordPress?

Yep, absolutely, it definitely delivers on what it says it will do, and that’s all I really ask from a product. It is suitable for anyone who wants their blog to look good and be looked at, for whatever reason. Also, I would recommend it to friends and consider it good value compared to outsourcing my SEO, PHP and CSS work. I feel a lot more comfortable taking care of that stuff myself in the interests of privacy, convenience, and ultimately cost in not having to continually liaise with a designer to get my blog looking just right. Anyway, I hope this review has helped you to make an informed decision.

DiyThemes Official Site:  www.diyThemes.com

Resource: http://my-internet-business-tools.com  – Gavin