I would be curious to know how old your domain was when search engine traffic picked up. Usually at around the 6 month time frame, and especially after a full year of a domain been active, Google will start to take your site seriously (spammers change domains every 4-6 months typically, so Google does this to protect against spammers). If that was the case, that might explain the sudden significant jump in traffic.

Armen – Thanks for taking the time to comment! I’ll go ahead and answer using the same numbers you’ve used for simplicity:

1) I would define popular plugins as the most downloaded ones. Many plugins require a PHP call to work properly, so you have to insert this into each new theme you try in order for them to function.

2) This may be my personal preference, but most of the themes I have use AJAX for posting comments. I’ve talked to others that feel the same way, so I suppose adding this could make your theme appeal to a wider audience.

4) This is true, but a theme is more likely to be downloaded if you offer it supporting widgets. I personally have never used them because I prefer to “get my hands dirty” with code.

5) I think that is a good point, but a text title usually only takes up 300px at most, and it is often hard to squeeze a logo into 300px. I guess that was my line of thought above.

Skarld – AdSense integration is a good one for people wanting to monetize your blog.

I’ve been reading your blog for a while, and I must commend you on some great, and insightful posts. Here’s my take on what you’ve said here:

1. How do you determine what’s a popular plugin? It’s different for everyone. Plus, except for when you just set up your blog, you’ll already have all your desired plugins installed when you’re looking for a new theme.

2. I really don’t see how this is necessary. If people would remove unnecessary widgets from their sidebars, then the page load time after commenting would be almost nonexistent.

3. Agreed. It makes a lot more sense to have a proper navigational menu of sorts.

4. Again, I agree. However, if people would just read plugin documentation, they could figure out how to add things to the sidebar without themes being widget-ready.

5. It’s much easier to remove the text title, or replace it with an image, than it is for people who want the text title, to add it to the theme.

I’d say, what’s a no-no in a theme, is to have size 11 Verdana for post content.

Excellent points. I also look for the theme to load the content before the sidebar. This has a tremendous impact on SEO in my own personal experience. After I switched to a theme that loaded post content first, my search engine traffic went from a literal trickle (30-40 per month) to a sizeable amount (2000+). Of course, there were other tweaks I have been implementing as I learn them to make ShanKri-la search engine friendly, but I believe this one was a big one! I would love to hear what you think about it.