DIYThemes President Chris Pearson: With SEO, Less is More by, Vanessa Zamora on May 3, 2011

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During the recent PubCon South at Austin 2011 conference held in the capital city of Texas, video content producer Vanessa Zamora sat down for a video interview with Chris Pearson, president at DIYThemes. The creator of the widely used Thesis WordPress theme, downloaded over 37,000 times, attributes his success to filling a universal need for access to a well-coded website.

When asked about WordPress plug-in recommendations, Pearson suggested against using any plug-ins if possible, to keep security risks to a minimum. The Thesis theme, however, does not produce XML sitemaps, an essential element to getting indexed in the search engines, so Pearson suggested the WordPress Google Sitemaps plug-in, but warned that it can be inefficient. A more efficient plug-in to produce XML sitemaps is WordPress SEO by Joost de Valk, Pearson continued, but it is packaged with other search engine optimization (SEO) tools that website users might not want or use.

Most people do not realize that getting the desired results from a website is easier than one thinks, Pearson said. With SEO, less is more, and people have overcomplicated things, Pearson continued. He went on to suggest that website creators use categories only when necessary, a common misconception. It is a way for the website creator to organize the content and display it in an efficient way, Pearson continued. Since going back and reorganizing the categories on his own website, narrowing down some 38 categories to just 4, Pearson now has better cross-linking, and cross traffic moves around his website with a lot more intent. Having focused his categories, Pearson revealed that good traffic is more important than just having a lot of traffic.

With regards to selecting a Web host provider, Pearson shared that virtual private servers (VPS) are all the rage right now, and that he personally works with vps.net. Hosting companies all suffer from similar problems, and there is no perfect hosting solution, but looking for a hosting company who is responsive and who provides the kind of support needed is of most importance, said Pearson.

Next up for Pearson is the release of Thesis 2.0, something he has been working on since 2009 and that is set to debut in the next couple of months. It is going to change the way people think about the way they build websites, Pearson concluded.