I’ve been using the W3 Total Cache plug-in for WordPress ever since it was recommended by Joost who seems to be one of the few original thinkers in the WordPress developer community. When he posts something, it usually turns out to be dead-on accurate, if for no other reason than he usually writes about his reasoning and what led him to his conclusions. It is an extra step that ensures you really know what you are talking about because then you can’t just blame a different opinion if someone comes in and points out that you are wrong based on something in your reasoning being faulty or disprovable. So, when says that WordPress publishers should be using W3 Total Cache, I listen.

However, a recent upgrade to the W3 Total Cache led to a minor annoyance. While the caching functionality is still flawless and the features in the caching WordPress 3.0 add-on are the best out there, one chance to the interface was made that bugs me.

W3TC used to be like most other WordPress plug-ins. Configuring the cache plug was done from the Settings menu on the sidebar, or by going into the Plug-ins screen and choosing settings from the options on the plugin itself. The new version adds its own special menu to the standard WordPress menu bar. Worse, it is labeled “Performance” instead of W3 Cache or something similar.

This bothers me for two reasons. One, the standard interface for WordPress is that plugins are managed via Settings, or in some cases, Tools, or within the Plugins area itself. The other menus are reserved for core WordPress functions and specifically categorized sub-functions like Themes which are supposed to be listed under Appearance. Two, labeling it as “Performance” strikes me as disingenuous even if that is not the intention. It is almost like the developer wants it to seem as if the functions provided by W3TC are core to the WordPress system when they are not. It will also increase confusion among those of us who make money writing online for a lot of our own websites, WordPress and otherwise.

I don’t reconfigure my WordPress sites every day. I do a lot of posting via Windows Live Writer or QuickPress or even ScribeFire, which means that days or even a week or two can go by without me seeing the Administrator screen in WordPress. When I do go into WordPress admin and I want to tweak my W3 Total Cache Minify settings, for example, I will no doubt click Settings and upon not finding it there try Tools or the Plugin screens. Even if I did happen to notice the cache settings menu (I work fast and I know what it supposed to be on each screen, so I have screen blindness to things that I am not looking for deliberately), it is likely that I wouldn’t know to use it right away because it is generically labeled Performance and what I am trying to find is W3 Total Cache not some WordPress performance settings.

This is not an indictment of W3 Total Cache, nor a reason to not use it or switch to another WordPress caching plug-in, but it does strike me as a move in the wrong direction for both the WordPress interface in general, and the development of this particular WordPress 3.0 plugin.

A lot of WordPress themes claimed to be optimized for AdSense. When you look at them, what they really mean is that they included some spots for you to put AdSense ads by default. Some of them will actually fill in Google AdSense ads automatically if you put in your AdSense account ID number. That is not AdSense optimized so much as AdSense for dummies themes.

Some themes are a little more honest claiming only to be AdSense Ready as opposed to AdSense Optimized. Of course, if you think about it, all WordPress 3.0 themes and all earlier versions of WordPress themes are AdSense ready since you can ad the Google AdSense code to them. If you want to be really honest, every blogging platform from Blogger to TypePad to Live Spaces (or whatever they are calling it these days) are AdSense ready. All you actually need to be AdSense ready is to be able to edit the source code and publish it after adding a little bit of JavaScript which is how all AdSense ads are coded. So, again, these themes are not AdSense ready as much as they are AdSense ad locations installed by default.

What would it take to be a true AdSense Optimized WordPress theme?

That is an important question for those looking to make money writing online. The answer has nothing to do with pre-filled AdSense code or designs that leave spaces open for you to publish ads in. Rather, what a fully AdSense optomized theme requires is:

1. Be fully SEO optimized. Face it, you get your ad clicking traffic from Google search results so the most important thing to make money with AdSense is to be as highly ranked in SERPs as possible.
2. Minimize AdSense Static. This is where most of those so-called AdSense ready and AdSense optimized themes fall flat on their face. Nothing ruins your ability to earn money with Google AdSense like getting irrelevant ads displayed on your webpages. Nothing gives you irrelevant ads faster than having too many non-targeted keywords littering your webpage. All of those comments that you did not write are throwing off your ad targeting, that is, unless your WordPress theme incorporates Google AdSense section targeting tags. Open up that source code and look for <!– google_ad_section_start –>. If you don’t see it, your theme is NOT AdSense optimized.
3. Eliminate AdSense Interference – Even better would be a theme that separates out the comments from the post, or one that requires a click by the user from the “real” keyword targeted post with your carefully chosen content in order to expand the comments section. That way, Google can index your good stuff, match ad keywords based upon your carefully worded articles, while still allowing your readers to interact with you and your website’s community.

Ironically, most WordPress themes for writers trying to make money writing (and frankly, pretty much every WordPress theme in existence) fails these conditions like a high-school dropout taking the GED without studying after a night out drinking. That means it is up to you. If you want your theme to really be fully optimized you’ll have to stick those Google section tags into the source code manually.

Happy writing, and may big passive income come to you and your writing always.

Voidy claims to be a WordPress theme for authors. This writer’s WordPress 3.0 theme has a home page that claims that there is good content and that there is great content. Voidy, it seems, is only useful for those who write great content. Or, at least, that is what the poor developer of another WordPress theme for writers thinks after spending too much time listening to the echo chamber inside the blogosphere.

The idea upon which many new free WordPress themes for writers are based is that writers, that is good writers, and presumably, professional writers, either don’t want or don’t need anything fancy “distracting readers” from their amazing writing. Therefore, top writers want WordPress theme features that don’t have extra things to worry about like being AdSense ready themes, or SEO optimized themes, or heaven forbid, attractive themes with graphics and nice typography. No, you see, writers just want their wonderful text to sit alone, black on a sea of white open space, so that their readers can bask in the glory of powerful writing and beautiful prose.

I don’t know where this grade-school fantasy of what a real writer is like came from. I first encountered the whole “writers want simple, plain, uncomplicated WordPress themes to showcase their writing” nonsense from the Erudite WordPress theme. (Incidentally, real writers would not use the word “erudite” in this manner, even if its meaning could be shoehorned into titling the design concept. If nothing else, it is conjugated improperly. Anyway…)

Ever since then, every time I find a new WordPress theme for writers, it has this same banal design motif at its core.

Writers WordPress Themes Should Make Money Easy from Great Content

It will likely take a person who is both a quality writer and a quality web developer to create the first truly great WordPress theme for writers. When it happens, you can be sure that it won’t be a plain theme that “showcases” the writer’s writings.

What a professional writer really wants from a WordPress theme is for the theme to handle all of those other things that have to happen in order for the mythology of Content Is King to come true. As writers, we don’t worry about our content being overshadowed. We right great content. If that is what you want, then you’ll read our stuff regardless of what flash-based graphics are moving around the text. What we DO actually worry about is that our quality articles and well-researched posts will be buried in the wasteland at Page 8 of Google search engine results pages, while thin, barely passable junk posts make thousands of dollars a month for their authors because the person that wrote those articles knew to nofollow his Header 1 links to the .htaccess file next to the noindex parameter of WordPress widgets and their canonical links.

You get the point.

What REAL writers WordPress theme does is make sure that when we write high-quality posts they get all the right tags and links and nofollows and whatever else they need so that Google can find them, index them, rank them highly, and allow the writer to benefit from not only having produced “great content” but also having had that content indexed properly and ranked #1 by Google for all of the relevant keywords, all without us having to hack up our writing to satisfy Google’s engineers. In other words, a professional writer wants a WordPress theme for writers that makes money with writing quality.

Somehow this turned into a rant about bad WordPress themes for writers out there. I’m not going to let it go to waste or rewrite it. Properly using and re-using content written is how to earn money writing online easily and quickly. Instead, you can come back tomorrow or the next day (depending upon how it gets scheduled) and read the rest of the Voidy WordPress Theme for Writers review.

(Hey, look at that, a precious link to the review article that will count as a vote that the webpage that opens when you click it is the King of Content even though neither your nor the spider that follows the link have any idea of whether or not the words on that page are anything but gibberish. — Whew! I guess I’m testy today

Every day it seems like my RSS feed reader has at least a handful of posts about the greatest WordPress plugins of all time, or the best SEO plug-ins for WordPress, or — my personal favorite — top WordPress plug-ins you can’t live without. (And my not so favorite, WordPress plugins you “literally” can’t live without; someone needs to look up the word ‘literally’ before they ever use it again.) I have never bothered to write a post about the best WordPress plugins because I have used different plugins on different websites depending upon what the purpose of the website was and how I intended to use it. I have written about the best WordPress themes for writers because there seems to be a knowledge gap there. However, I have now found a plugin that everyone should use on every WordPress blog site that they have no matter what the website is for.

The One WordPress Plug-in Everyone Needs on Every Site

No matter had good of professional writer you are, and no matter what you write about, you will eventually end up with a broken link on your site.

A broken link is a hyperlink that points to a webpage that no longer exists (or never existed). No matter how careful someone is, this will eventually happen to every user on every site, because webpages move or are deleted for all kinds of different reasons. the most common reason a webpage is moved is when it is archived, or when the link points to a news or current events kind of page that may be moved or eliminated when it is no longer considered current.

Of course, there are a lot of other reasons that a weblink can disappear. For example, Technorati links created over a year or two ago pointed to technorati.com/tags/keyword. Now, all Technorati tags have URIs using the word ‘tag’ instead of ‘tags’. Most of those will be redirected if clicked. If those redirects are setup as 301 Redirects for SEO purposes then some of their link power will still flow to the final destination.

However, links that are either not redirected at all, or that are redirected in another manner will result in a Page Not Found error for users and waste the so-called link juice of page authority because Google will still count it as an outbound link even if it doesn’t go anywhere. Even if you are not using the ranking link power of that page for your own purposes, it is still valuable to ensure that the links you do have benefit fully from your link juice.

The trouble is that it is way too labor intensive to check each and every link on anything but the smallest websites. Even if you hired some work at home temp to check them all it would still take forever, and worse of all, it would all have to be done again. Just because a link exists today, doesn’t mean it will still be there tomorrow.

WordPress Broken Links Plug-In

The WordPress plug-in Broken Links automatically checks every link on your entire WordPress blog website. All broken links that are found are displayed on a single screen.

– Take a break and read the Southwest Airlines rewards card review.

If this was all the Broken Links WordPress plugin did, I wouldn’t be writing about it. What makes Broken Links the best WordPress plugin ever for writers and webmasters is that the broken links that are found can be edited right from the report the plugin generates. In other words, there is no need to open every post that has a dead link, find the link, see where it goes, and then edit or delete the link. Instead, the Broken Links plug-in lets you unlink the broken URL with a single click. No need to ever leave the screen. If you want to fix the link rather than get rid of it, just click Edit URL instead and the link becomes editable right there. Again, you don’t even have to open the original post to fix every broken link on your site.

THAT would be enough to make me write about this top WordPress plug-in everyone needs. But, that is not the end. WordPress 3.0 plug-in Broken Links also shows all the links on your site that are being redirected. As we’ve noted before, redirecting incoming URLs with 301 Permanently Moved redirects helps preserve the link juice flowing to those pages as a way of keeping their Page Rank and authority, but not 100% of the link power flows through a 301 redirect. To get that, you have to modify the link itself. Unfortunately, doing that is just as big of undertaking as fixing all the broken links on your website.

However, the Broken Links WordPress 3.0 plug-in detects redirected links and allows you to edit them on the same screen just like it does for links that are broken. That means you can fix 100 links with the wrong address in the URL in just a few minutes. For example, I moved the Best Hubris strategy, management, and marketing blog from www.besthuris.com to besthubris.com a little while back. While I have 301 redirects in place to remove the www from all incoming URLs, there is no substitute for getting all the links to actually point at BestHubris without the www in them. So, I’ve been going through and and clicking Edit URL and removing the www in small batches as a way to take break between freelance writing projects.

I’ve loaded Broken Links on all of my websites now and expect to do the same to each of them, where needed, in the coming weeks and months.

Turbo Boost SEO Power with WordPress 3.0 Plug-in Broken Links

Unlinking broken links to give the links that are left more link juice power, plus retaining the full link power juice of any pages that have been moved and redirected may actually provide more SEO benefit than all of the WordPress SEO plugins out there do by tweaking title tags, header tags, and meta-data. I’ll be keeping an eye on my analytics reports and on Google Webmaster Tools to see just what kind of benefit using the Broken Links plugin for WordPress 3.0 gives my websites.

What do you do, if anything, to check for broken links on your websites? Do you check for redirected links? How much link juice linking power do you think your are wasting if you don’t fix old out of date links?

WordPress blogging platform is one of the best ways for writers to build websites to showcase their writing talent. It is also a great way to build an online writing portfolio and is a very useful platform for earning money writing online. Now that WordPress 3.0 has been released, the question is when to install the new version.If you are used to software updates on your personal computer, you might be tempted to run out and install the latest version of blogging software right away in order to get all the new features and bug fixes. When it comes to using WordPress to make money writing online, that is not always the best strategy.

In order to make money writing online, you need more than just the default base installation of WordPress. There are important plugins for WordPress to search optimize your posts, to automatically configure Google Analytics, and caching plugins for WordPress. Of course, don’t forget about the customizations from WordPress themes. If you are a professional writer building a money making website online, or just using a website to showcase your own writing or writing business, you need a high-quality theme.

United airlines dining rewards review tells the good and bad.

The best WordPress themes for writers are not always fancy, but they do make full use of all the available WordPress functionality. That means that upgrading your WordPress installation is about more than just updating WordPress. You also have to update your WordPress plug-ins, your WordPress themes, and any custom code that you implemented yourself in order to maximize the earning potential or traffic building power of your online web presence. Unless you wrote the HTML, CSS, and source code for the WordPress add-ons you have installed, you have to wait for the developers of them to update their themes and plugins. Since most of these are free, chances are that they are not the only things going on in that developer’s life which means you might have to wait a few days, or even a week or two for your favorite WordPress plugins and writing themes to be fully upgraded to support the latest version of WordPress.

Over the next few days, you will notice that most or all of your plugins will be updated. You can see this by looking at the number in the circle near the word Plugins on the current WordPress dashboard screen. Once most of your plugins have been updated (and once ALL of your critical function plugins have been updated), then and only then, can you look at upgrading your blog to WordPress 3.0.

Until then, just sit tight. WordPress 3.0 is all about better functionality, more blogging features, and better performance and faster speed. There is no need to update immediately for security reasons. That means that being patient is also be safe. Better that, than to take down your passive income generation machine.

Let’s face it, the fastest and easiest way to make money writing online is by generating a truckload of good, solid, easy to write, usable content, just like you do every day as a skilled writer. Then, sign up for Google’s advertising program and get approved for Google AdSense and put some well placed ads on your high-quality content. Of course, you’ll also be on the hook for driving some traffic to your content by link building and other online marketing tactics, but you’ll have to do that no matter what you do to earn money online.

Yes, there are other affiliate marketing programs or those semi-legitimate pay per action ads that may or may not pay out higher income, but they all take another level of effort that diverges into the world of web design and Internet marketing. There isn’t anything wrong with that, of course, it just is not the same thing as earning money by writing online. When it comes to making money from your writing (and, of course, some basic level search engine optimization and writing techniques) Google AdSense plus good original content is king.

Best WordPress Themes for Writers To Use For Earning Money

In order to make setup, design, and adding content as simple as possible, many professional writers use the WordPress blogging platform as their content management back-end. You just pick a theme, tweak some settings for maximum search engine impact, add some useful WordPress plugins for writers, pick a good WordPress theme and then start writing.

The catch is that finding a good WordPress theme is not as easy as it sounds. Unfortunately, many theme directories have taken to showing just the upper-left hand corner of a theme screenshot. That isn’t very helpful if you are looking for a good WordPress theme for writers that displays your content elegantly and powerfully. After all, WHO CARES what the header image is? If you aren’t replacing that image anyway, you aren’t really customizing your publishing platform.

Even worse are the fatal flaws that can make your AdSense earnings lower than they should be without you even knowing it!

Every expert there is from Google itself, to advertising experts, to off-line advertisers, to writers and bloggers that actually make their living writing online will give you one major piece of advice for generating higher income from AdSense. That advice is to put a prominent ad above the fold. That means that the best WordPress themes for writers leave room for an ad and some content near the top of the design.

For those of you who haven’t gotten down the basic terminology of design and marketing online, above the fold for webpages basically means what the visitor to your website can see when the page first loads. In other words, above the fold is what you can see without scrolling down.

Now, do just a little bit of math (metaphorically speaking) and tell me, how can you display your article title, show at least a minimum amount of catchy, attention grabbing text from your writing, and show a decent sized Google ad, when the theme has some huge header image built-in?

Seriously, if you are looking at a WordPress theme with a header image and menu area that takes up one-third of the screen before it shows a single bit of word-based content, you are looking at a money losing theme for writers, not a money making theme for writers. Big, fancy graphics might look nice in a theme gallery, but they are space wasting, income ruining, bandwidth hogging, non-features when it comes to really making money writing online from home or anywhere else.

Make sure your WordPress theme is efficient and readable, or all the WordPress theme SEO-optimized header tags and other nonsense in the world won’t make a bit of difference.

Regular readers here at make money writing online know that I am on a quest to find the perfect WordPress theme for writers. After numerous new free themes came out proclaiming themselves to be WordPress themes for writers based on the fact that they were “plain” and therefore made “writing the focus” of the blog, I wondered what features and WordPress options would make the best theme for writers.

Obviously, this is no small undertaking. Writers come in all shapes and sizes. From writers looking to earn money writing online as a side business, to professional freelance writers, all the way to those looking to startup a writing business from home, covering all writers is tough business. However, as we’ve searched the WordPress theme gallery, and Google searched our way around the WordPress theme world, some very useful WordPress features have stood out as necessary to a top WordPress theme for writers. We’ve been cataloging those things that WordPress themes require to be the best money making writing themes out there as we go along so that until we do find a nice catalog of great WordPress themes for professional writers you can use the features for writers we have discovered to do your own analysis of themes that you find for yourself.

Today, we look at an important WordPress theme menu navigation feature that all good writer’s WordPress themes should have.

Customizable Menu Options for WordPress Themes

It is bad enough that as writers we have to dumb down our writing to fit into the outdated model that Google uses to index and rank search engine results. Clever titles and crafty writing are nothing more than suicide notes from writers who want more traffic to come to their websites. With that in mind, the writer should not also be further boxed into small minded navigation and menu options by theme developers who claim that all writers want from a WordPress theme is simple black and white text display.

While most on-page SEO tactics are nothing more than snake oil pedaled by SEO consultants and other search engine optimization experts, one critical SEO feature for writers is getting the right keywords in the titles of their webpages. Nothing gives a writer (or anyone else) a better chance of ranking high for a keyword or key phrase than exactly matching the search query typed into that little box on Google’s home page. To do that, requires titles that are occasionally wordy, or poorly framed. Fortunately, those bad writing titles can be hidden within the unused (by humans) title tags of the webpage in question. Then, a more sensical (but still optimized) title can be used in the H1 tags of the page.

All of this works provided that WordPress theme does not insist on taking whatever title it finds and jamming it into the menu bar or link list displayed automatically by the theme’s source code. For example, consider this money making blog theme currently being used here on makemoneywritingonline.com.

You see that menu in the upper right corner?

See that last tab? The one that says, “Writing Business Start-Up Guide“? You can about imagine why that is the title of the page. Fortunately, this particular theme uses small text up there and it doesn’t mess up the look of the theme, but that isn’t always the case. The problem is particularly acute for web developers and content publishers looking to take advantage of the Page functionality of WordPress. Many themes insist on listing all pages as menu options, and of course, using their full titles to do so. Unfortunately, most of them do not have the ability to deal with a WordPress blog that has enough pages to require two rows, or provide the webmaster with any easy way to configure which pages to display or how to have them titled when they are displayed.

So, we add another criteria for a good WordPress writer theme. Menu bars, side menus, and features that work based on displaying Pages must be configurable both for display as well as for which ones are displayed. All other themes shall be relegated to the for use only by Internet marketers and those who like flash over substance and success.

Theme on, my friends.

We’ve been looking at what kinds of features and functionality professional freelance writers should look for in a WordPress theme. At first, it can be hard to quantify exactly what a writer needs in a WordPress theme because they sort of all start to blend together and you forget what it was that compelled you to download one theme over another in the first place. Then, as you start to try and actually implement the themes it starts to get clearer. Whenever there is something that a writer can’t do easily with that WordPress writers theme, then you know what features are important.

One feature that is vitally important for any writer looking to make money writing online, is the ability to automatically provide links to other writings. For example, a freelancer writing a WordPress blog about local events as a way to drum up interest from local business, for example, would want that site to link to their freelance writing business website automatically. In this case, adding the homepage of that website to the blogroll or other link list would suffice, but what about really powerful link building?

While many SEO experts offer the misguided advice to be stingy with your links, one should never pass up the opportunity to link for their own benefit. For example, if there was a particular post on your blog that seemed to be attracting a lot of attention and traffic, using that page to link to other pages in your blog will boost that posts as well. This way you don’t end up with a huge website that has only two pages that have a high enough search engine ranking to ever draw any website traffic.

To really take advantage, however, you would also want to link your high PageRank pages and posts from many other places as well. That site about parenting skills could link to articles on your writing site about how to write high school essays that get good grades. Likewise, the writing site could link to an article about parenting tips for dads showing how important good writing skills are.

Doing this within individual posts is useful and essential for long-term search engine optimization power. However, linking to several of the best posts a writer has from all over requires putting those links in the template or widget part of a WordPress theme.

That is why the best WordPress themes for writers must include either a footer that can be used partially for links, or well-configured sidebars that can be filled with widgets full of links. Unfortunately, it seems that too many themes are either designed for AdSense, or designed for those who never want to earn money by writing. Smart writers want themes that are somewhere in between.

Finding the best WordPress themes for writers isn’t easy. In fact, it can be downright frustrating. Browsing through theme directories or scrolling through a huge WordPress theme gallery can be a daunting and unproductive task. Throw in the fact that the average screenshot graphic picture doesn’t really give you much of an idea how the theme actually works (does it have drop down menus, does it use lots of custom functions, does it require plug-ins, does it use too much JavaScript, and so on) and you have a recipe for a lot of wasted time that could be better used writing great high-quality content for your freelance writing business website.

Another option is to find a website dedicated to WordPress or to web design and search for articles listing their Top 10 WordPress themes, or their favorite “clean” WordPress themes, or magazine themes, or whatever. The catch to this approach is that you never really know the motivation of the author who wrote the article, or how hard they really looked into it before creating their post. After all, best WordPress theme posts are popular and with the right search engine optimization and linking, they can also be search engine traffic goldmines. This is likely why you see a lot of the same themes show up in post after post about which themes are the best. Ironically, I’ve seen the same WordPress themes listed in articles about the Top WordPress themes for Personal Bloggers and Top WordPress themes for corporate blogs, although one might assume that such criteria would generate differing lists.

The worst part is that some WordPress developers have built themes for writers based, not on experience as a writer, or based on a writer’s specifications, but based on what they imagine a writer to be. Unfortunately, it appears that “writer” conjures up images of 15 year-old girls writing angst filled poetry in their bedrooms without a thought in their heads about money or worldly possessions. Either that, or some “screw the money” hard-boiled journalist who just wants to get the truth out there without having to go through a pin-headed editor.

A real freelance writer wants a WordPress theme that makes it easy to WRITE without all of that other stuff getting in the way, not as the developers assume, a theme that makes it easy to READ without all of those pesky revenue generating ads and passive income generating affiliate links.

Open note to WordPress developers looking to make a new WordPress theme for writers: We are GOOD at what we do. That means that we don’t have any fear that some ads or graphics are going to overshadow the text we write for our websites. We don’t need empty. We need profitable, easy, and customizable. Oh, and also, don’t do things that makes it look like stuff we wrote awhile ago is now junk. With the exception of current events, we try and write content that will stand the test of time.

Where to Find Best WordPress Themes For Writing Websites

The best bet is to find a respected and trusted WordPress resource. That way, at least you know the list of themes they generate is probably a good starting point for your WordPress theme search, if nothing else. Try websites like Smashing Magazine and Hongkiat for starters. If you are a little more familiar with computers, coding, HTML, and the like, a great resource is Cats Who Code. Of course, be sure to watch the dates!

A quick interruption to plug my latest Credit Card Rewards Reviews articles…

WordPress updates pretty fast, and the best WordPress themes for version 2.6 might not be the best WordPress themes for version 2.9. Worst case scenario, some themes might be so out of date that they actually don’t function properly with WordPress any more. Even if the theme does work, that doesn’t mean it is ideal. Many great WordPress themes include features that were added on by the theme developer to address a short coming in the main WordPress release. However, WordPress tends to eventually incorporate the best feature ideas and suggestions, so these band-aids can actually become a determinant to a site’s speed and compatibility.

WordPress itself maintains a WordPress Theme Directory, and there are tons of others as any Google search will reveal. There are plenty of free WordPress themes out there that are high-quality. Until you have built and run a couple of blogs for awhile, stick with those. What you think you want today will almost certainly not be what you need once you really understand what you are doing.

As it turns out, however, the absolute best way to find awesome WordPress themes is to check out the ones your favorite websites already are using. All it takes is a little knowledge to know how to tell what WordPress theme any website is using.

The guys over at WordPress Hacks recently updated their ever popular best free WordPress themes article for 2010 and that got me thinking again about all of the themes I’ve looked through. In the ongoing quest to find the best WordPress themes for writers I’ve looked at TONS of WordPress themes, and I do mean TONS. I’ve looked at free WordPress themes, I’ve looked at premium WordPress themes, I’ve looked at theme frameworks, I’ve looked at WordPress Photoshop template files, I’ve looked at empty themes, basic themes, and yes, even themes that claim to be great WordPress themes for writers. The good news is that means that I have a lot of experience with what is out there for good WordPress themes to use for professional writers. The bad news is that the reason I have looked through so many different WordPress themes is because I still haven’t found the perfect theme, yet.

I could do like everyone else does and just compile a bunch of links to good WordPress themes. I could even give it a really great SEO optimized title like 25 Best WordPress Themes for Writers. But, in an effort to perhaps speed along the development of quality WordPress themes for writers to use, I decided to compile a list of the best features a WordPress theme can have to make it useful for writers, and frankly, everyone else too.

Search Engine Optimized – SEO Ready WordPress Themes Required

Let’s get real here for a minute. Professional writers are professional writers because they get paid for what they do. Writing professionally isn’t easy, and quality writing and quality website content are valuable commodities. Running a freelance writing business website is a lot more profitable if people actually see it. As Han Solo once said, "I ain’t in this for your revolution, Highness. I expect to be well paid."

While there are numerous reasons a pro writer might create and publish a website, every one of those reasons succeeds or fails on a single criteria, getting enough traffic driven to the website in order to see all those webpages filled with high-quality professional writing. Leaving aside the debate about whether or not content is king when it comes to search engine rankings, one thing is clear, unless you have the means to manually drive readers to your website, you’ll need to grab search engine traffic to establish a readership. And, the way to a searcher’s heart, is through the first page of Google search results.

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A few years ago, an Internet expert and SEO guru named Court published a list of top SEO problems in WordPress themes. He was right on the money, and it was a hit. At first, only the best WordPress themes were properly search engine optimized.  It took a while, but soon the entire WordPress developer community was cranking out SEO-optimized WordPress themes. Today, only the lowest quality WordPress themes make the basic SEO errors that Court outlined in his post.

The problem is that developers have stopped there. The last was called the most basic SEO errors committed in WordPress themes for a reason; they were the BASIC SEO ERRORS. They were not the ONLY SEO errors made in WordPress themes. So, while most quality themes now exploit Google’s overdependence on being told what is "important" on a webpage via header tags — that’s the H1, H2, H3 tags in your theme’s code — by making a post’s title the H1 element instead of the blog’s name. However, many themes still do not handle H2, H3, and H4 properly. Just making everything else H2 is NOT good SEO practice.

Some of the SEO issue in WordPress has been solved by the platform’s extensibility in the form of plug-ins. The most common SEO plugins for WordPress are All-In-One SEO plugin (outstanding SEO in it’s name, BTW), and Headspace2 (not so good on the SEO, but more "brandable"). These plug-ins allow webmasters and authors to easily set certain SEO parameters automatically, or make it easier to set them manually. These SEO WordPress plugins will ensure that your title tag is the same as you post title unless you set it otherwise, for example.

So, what else does a high-quality WordPress theme for writers need?

That’s coming up next…