The folks over at the northStudio Drupal Development team have released a killer Drupal 6 Theme that is both SEO friendly and easily customizable. The theme is called Layout Studio and it is based on the current standard Zen theme. Layout Studio provides a little more flexibility to the designer than the Zen theme, such as more layout options, symantically correct region naming, and more body, block, and node classes to advanced CSS usability.

I provided consultation to the northStudio team as they developed this theme. I gave them ideas as to how to ensure that it was the most search engine friendly theme available. Among other, some of the main changes from regular Drupal themes that I had them implement were:

• Use of <h1> tags for the node titles instead of the site name or logo
• Cleaner code output
• Moving the primary content higher up in the code
• Built in "credit link" to ensure a link back to your company
• Automated copyright information

I've been using the Layout Studio Drupal 6 theme since it's pre-release days and have been very happy with it. It has a class for absolutely everything you can imagine. Many times I will take over a Drupal site from another company or designer that is not using the theme and I immediately run in to theming issues. I never even expect these issues because I have been spoiled by the usability of Layout Studio. I would recommend that everyone test this theme at once, I do suggest reading the documentation as there are a couple of crucial steps included. Once you have used this theme successfully you will start to despise working on sites with other themes. The main difference is that everything imaginable has a unique class making CSS work super simple.

From a Search Engine Optimization point of view Layout Studio only increases the ease with which a Drupal website can optimized. Drupal is very search engine friendly out-of-the-box and due to the many user contributed modules allowing for custom optimization and covering every are of SEO, a Drupal website is built to dominate the search results. I use Drupal for every project I possibly can. It was fun to be involved in the creation of Layout Studio and I think we were able to implement some new changes that will help. I wouldn't call any of the changes major, but we did address a couple of areas where Drupal was coming up short. We were also able to implement a couple of extras that were on my wish list.

The Drupal CMS and the Layout Studio theme combine to proviced the simplest, most flexible web solution available. Here are some quick links to get you going using the best Drupal 6 theme available:

• Layout Studio Website
• Layout Studio Demo Site
• Download Layout Studio Drupal 6 Theme
• Project Page on Drupal.org
• Documentation