Thesis & First Link Priority

After reading Andy Beard’s article about Premium WordPress themes (I’d already watched the StomperNet videos) – I decided to spend some time with Thesis (my favorite premium themes). My goal was to customize Thesis to be even better at SEO, using simple custom_functions.php.

First: those dreaded header links – Yep, Thesis has those, most blog themes do. So, what to do about them? We still need a header area, it’s prime real estate on the page and our visitors expect to see certain things in that area: branding, name, navigation and other elements. We also want users to have navigation options so they can move around our site easily.

By default, Thesis already renders the sidebars below the content – so we’re all good on that point. So, let’s move the navigation  that usually appears above the Thesis #header, so it appears in the source code below the content. This takes a bit of custom code – place it in your custom_functions.php file.

// first let's remove the default Thesis nav
remove_action ('thesis_hook_before_header', 'thesis_nav_menu' );
// now let's add it back where we want it
add_action('thesis_hook_after_footer', 'thesis_nav_menu');

Once you’ve done that, you’ll want to style your #header to be a bit taller so you can position the nav bar where it belongs, I like it below the header image. Here’s an example from one of my sites added in the custom.css file (you may have made other style changes, this one is stripped down to the minimum):

.custom #tabs {
 top: 108px;
 position: absolute;
}

Now upload your changes to the /custom folder of your Thesis theme and reload your site. You should see the nav bar below the header and when you view source, you should see the html for the navbar appearing after the footer. Here’s an example using Print Preview in the browser.

What’s this do? This makes the first links encountered on your page those found in the content of your site, rather than the shorter less descriptive default navigation links that usually precede the meat of your page. First Link Priority: This means you have greater control over the link text giving you more control over how the search engines see your pages.

You could also move the entire header area with site name and tagline to the bottom with a bit more tweaking.  There are more in depth changes that can be made to further enhance this on a site, which changes you make depend on how you use your site (as a cms or as a straight blog) this is just an overview to get you started thinking in that direction.