Best Wordpress Themes or Theme Creators for Best SEO Results

[ROYINOW]

Hi, I just recently joined SEOMOZ and am excited to be apart of the community.  I am launching a blog to educate mu readers on a variety of topics.  Is there any specific themes or theme creators that do a great job at structuring their themes from a technical perspective for the best SEO results?  Thanks!

[sergio_redondo]

Always glad to be useful to the community.

Regards.

Sergio

[DeanAndrews]

Sergio mentioned Child Themes. Personally I would recommend the use of frameworks that support child themes, easier to upgrade, easier to make changes. In the long run just easier.

Also Sergio thanks for the PageNavi suggestion.

[deaddogdesign]

Thesis, Genesis, ect.  Doesn't matter you can install Yoast like Andy said.

[sergio_redondo]

I agree with William. You must choose your theme based on your goals. Once you have your prefered theme, you have a huge list of plugins out there that can help you in your SEO tasks, but let me give you my favorites:

-WordPress SEO by Yoast (Andy and William are correct, it's the best): it lets you do a great on-page optimization, e.g. titles, meta descriptions, rel canonical, robots, etc.

-XML-Sitemaps: although Yoast plugin gives you the possibility of auto-generating a sitemap of your website, lately presented some operational problems. So, the best option is XML-Sitemap, where you can generate and send to search engines both sitemaps and compressed sitemaps.

-W3 Total Cache: SEO is not just about on-page optimization and linkbuilding, but website performance too. You need to pay attention to how your site appears to users: load speed, browser cache, javascript and css minifying, etc. This plugin lets you control all these variables (Warning: be careful, you must know what you do).

-PageNavi: this fantastic plugin helps you with the pagination of your website, one task that sometimes can harm your SEO efforts.

Apart from these plugins, there are themes that come pre-configured to support the optimization of your website. You need to use these frameworks and work with child themes:

-Thematic: made by Automattic, the WordPress Team.

-Genesis: by StudioPress.

-Canvas: by Woothemes; is not a framework itself, but comes with a bunch of SEO features; recently announced that the SEO features would be replaced by Yoast plugin.

Hope to be helpful.

Sergio.

[WilliamCarr]

The theme would really depend on the goals of your website.

I'm a big fan of U-Design by Andon. Andy is 100% correct. The Yoast SEO plugin is an automatic for all of my wordpress sites.

[AndyMacLean]

Dont know about theme but you NEED the Yoast SEO plugin for wordpress - it really is awesome.