The search for the ultimate WordPress theme, and indeed WordPress website development platform may be over…

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We set this site up as an on-going experiment in many ways, but have been too busy to do anything with it as yet, however that is all changing in 2010.

We’ve written before about wordpress seo before, covering..

WordPress’ inate SEO superiority, and

the best SEO plugins

But have so-far stayed off the subject of themes, because:

a) We build pre-optimized WordPress sites on any WordPress theme, and ultimately, like a HiFi, your SEO results can only ever be as good as the weakest link in your chain.

b) The theme can only ever only be as good as the SEO you put into WordPress underneath it, by way of your site content, structure etc, and a good theme cannot make up for a poorly designed site.

However, the theme is the site’s  on-page interface with Google with regards to your onsite SEO  (via the on page stylesheets, titles, layout etc)  so once you have a well-designed site, then your choice of theme can be very important to obtaining a superior seo performance.

After much experimentation this site now runs on Thesis, which is pretty damn cool.

The latest version of Thesis – 1.7 ‘s  “inbuilt SEO out of the box” is so good  even if you are not  SEO -minded, if you just build a good site, it will pretty much take care of it for you.

This is what really gives Thesis the edge, it converts WordPress into an incredibly powerful and flexible web design system, allowing maximum flexibility in how you handle, structure and configure your setup to suit.

From their site:

The Thesis Theme for WordPress is a high-quality template system that you can use to improve your site immediately.

Thesis boasts the strongest SEO of any theme on the market today thanks to its expertly-coded HTML + CSS + PHP framework. Not only that, Thesis also contains additional options that will allow you to fine-tune each and every page of your site. The days of worrying about your in-site SEO are over

—with Thesis, the strategy is “just add killer content.”

Not a coder? Not a problem. The Thesis option panels allow you to command your site with ease, while Thesis does all of the heavy lifting behind the scenes.

You’ve never had this much control over your site before, and this is precisely what makes Thesis indispensable to critical webmasters all over the globe.

We highly recommend that you check it out.