A few months ago I was having difficulty ranking a new website of mine and I was doing everything right. It just wasn’t popping how my sites usually do. The one thing I could find that was different was a theme I was using from StudioPress. I was using their Lifestyle theme. So I did a test. I registered 3 domains all using the same name with .com, .net, and .org. I used the same exact content, same structure, and I got 10 backlinks to each domain from the same sources. I did randomize the backlinks order as to not give one domain more back link juice. The 3 themes I used were Lifestyle, Serenity, and a Woo theme.
Lifestyle was on .com
Serenity was on .net
Woo was on .org
5 days later my rankings were
.com #64
.net #1
.org #4
I left them alone for two weeks and .com moved up to #43
So two weeks later I switched the StudioPress themes to the following:
Lifestyle to the .net
Serenity to the .com
3 days later the sites reversed positioning
.net (Lifestyle) dropped to #47
.com moved to #1
My last test I changed the .org (Woo) theme with the .net (lifestyle)
A week later the .org (now Lifestyle) moved to position #33
.net (now woo) moved up to position #6
Now I published these results on the StudioPress forum and got so much slack from the moderators,developers, and so called SEO experts there. They eventually took my post down. I guess thats why they still use PPC. LOL. However I received a few emails from people who were so thankful for my post and changed out their Lifestyle Theme. I heard back from a few of them later and their sites moved up several pages.
The funny thing was this post in the StudioPress forum got pretty ugly. Name calling, and people telling me that there is no way themes effect rankings. Well over the years I have proven that a sites design, layout, coding, all effect rankings. the position of keywords, internal links, images, and percentage of words vs. keywords all have an effect on your search rankings. Too bad these guys at StudioPress wouldn’t listen to me. But hey I have always been a trailblazer in the SEO field.
This Reminds me of the time I attended an SEO conference back in 2001 and this so called expert stated in front of a group of 1000 people that there is not magic number for the amount of keywords on a webpage. Keep in mind Yahoo was the big search engine then. So this so called expert was the SEO person for GetSmart.com which was a mortgage company similar to my LoansAmerica site at the time. So I called her out and asked her to search yahoo for keyword “mortgages” and then keyword “home loans”. I then stood up and showed the audience that GetSmart was listed no where on the 1st two pages, however I had 18 websites on the 1st two pages.
So back to StudiPress. They have great themes and a few of them I do recommend for SEO:
Corporate
Enterprise
Executive
Freelance
Serenity
Stay away from Lifestyle.