SEOSense 0.1b - A WordPress Theme For SEO & AdSense
In an effort to continue giving back to the community, I’m releasing my first WordPress theme–SEOsense.
What is SEOsense?
SEOsense is a WordPress theme that aims to be very lightweight. It also attempts to provide a good framework to build a theme on. It focuses on search engine optimization and AdSense placement to make this happen. I’ll go into detail about each below.
WordPress Search Engine Optimization
There’s a number of things I did to focus on SEO with this theme. First and foremost I put the content first and used CSS to arrange the layout the way I want.
This is important because the higher the content, the more importance Google gives it. When your content is above your header and navigation–it lets Google know this is the most important content.
Search engines love more content and less markup, so I’ve focused on making this as clean and minimal as possible, using CSS whenever possible to style tags.
Another thing I did with SEOsense, is I attempt to generate the best page title possible.
Every title ends with your blog name. Your blog’s description is used for your main page. A post’s title is used for a post page. With categories, the category description is used unless it’s empty–then your category title is used.
I set it up like this so you can target specific keywords easily and make changes through the WordPress backend as needed.
Pages and posts have appropriate hierarchy and repetition to let Google know what the page is about.
WordPress AdSense Optimization
This area probably could have used a little more work, but I think it’s off to a good start. I personally don’t like “optimizing” AdSense to the point where it becomes hidden and tricky–so I’ve left some things I could have added out.
What I have done is allowed a large 728×90 ad up top. On single posts pages, I’ve wrapped the content around the ad.
On the archives and category pages, however, I’ve opted to put the ads between the posts. This is done through the functions.php file with the function betweenPosts(). I’ve found this a pretty clean way of inserting content between posts that allows for easy editing.
A few other notes
It’s good to note the entire theme uses 1 image, which is for the RSS feed icon. Without this image the theme is an impressive 13KB.
If you’re going to be using the AdSense, remember to swap out my ads with your own. While I love making money on sites that aren’t mine–something about that doesn’t seem right. 
If you don’t want to use AdSense, simply remove the code and everything should snap into place as expected.
There is a link to my website on the bottom. You do not have to leave it in, but I would appreciate it.
I tried to keep all of the ad’s separated from the layout for easy updating. The ads are located in ad-top.php, ad-single.php and ad-between.php.
The CSS is setup in a way that editing styles is easy. The first part is only structure, meaning the placement of the header/sidebar/content. Everything after /** Styling **/ is styling and can be edited to your hearts content.
Also, please note I’m not a designer by trade. I can design, but I’m color deaf. I’ve done my best to create an appealing theme, but the design is only a portion of this theme. The real work goes into the placement of content. This is part of the reason I make it so easy to edit, because it’s a framework and should be built off accordingly.
This is my first WordPress theme I’ve ever released, so I’d love to hear your feedback.
