Sarah Lewis, the designer who coded the theme on this site, was my super-hero when she increased my search traffic so dramatically.
She’s dug up 5 more SEO friendly WordPress themes that are free, so you no longer have to stress about losing out if you can’t afford a custom redesign!!
Also, Chris Pearson’s Cutline Theme is, of course, one of the best out there.
Sandbox is good too, but it needs some serious tweaking to look pretty, imho. 
Hope you don’t spend your entire weekend tweaking code – make sure you get out and enjoy the nice spring weather (well, just grin and bear it if you’re in the Midwest, like me).
Get Your FREE 21-Page Internet Business Idea Guide
Enter your name and email below and we’ll send you our unique 21-page guide chock full of Internet business ideas – for free! Your information will be kept private, of course.
Sparkplugging Founder Wendy Piersall is dang passionate about helping people start & grow a business while maintaining life balance (somehow). 
Easton Ellsworth is owner of 
Call me partial, but here are my designer’s free themes: http://www.briangardner.com/themes/
David, wouldn’t you agree!?
BTW, I love Sarah’s work too…and Chris’s PressRow was my 2nd choice after my present Vertigo.
It’s sunny here in Toledo, the last 2 hours…so it must be moving West, hope it moves closer to ya Wendy
Wendy,
I just spent the last several days looking fruitlessly for a template for a new blog that I am working on, and I never did find one that really got me excited.
I even saw some of the ones that you mentioned, but none of them had every single thing that I wanted, so I have decided to take a fairly blank 3-column layout and basically rebuild it in MY image.
It should be interesting, to say the least!
Ponn, indeed I do agree!
Brian did a great job with Vertigo. I’ve been using it since his version 1.0 came out so have made quite a few tweaks since last year.
Thanks for this list, Wendy. I often wonder if my current theme is helping me as best I’d like.
I’ma have a look at some of those themes. Maybe I can dig thru them to see what makes them tick.
And we here in Jersey are supposed to get a NorEaster this weekend.
I like http://www.semiologic.com/
Another vote for Brian Gardner’s theme’s over here. I’ve tweaked his dropshadow theme and I don’t think a custom made design would serve me all that much better. I may be wrong though.
If Brian’s theme’s are not SEO friendly, then someone should give him a tip or two, because the physical structure of his theme’s blows most of the competition away. Plus, they are so easy to edit. The code is well layed out so even someone as clueless as I, can figure out what does what.
Thanks for including the Fresh theme. I’m playing around with it on my blog right now — I’m spending my weekend tweaking code instead of finishing my taxes! At least in Massachusetts we have an extra day to file taxes because Monday is Patriot’s Day.
A great tool to see how any of your pages are “seen” by the search engines, is to use this “Search Engine Spider Simulator”:
http://www.webconfs.com/search-engine-spider-simulator.php
Hope this helps.
Comparably, I see my middle column could be pushed further down the list of posts vs. Wendy/Sarah’s both columns posted at the bottom.
But all text is nicely read…I checked and saw much worse ones.
It actually takes very little to make Wordpress SEO friendly – loads of themes already out there use nice code, and Wordpress is naturally SEO friendly. It’s more the tweaks after that give you the extra leverage, and how you use your content.
Still, they are nice themes listed – will check those out and have a little play with them.
They are nice layouts but some of them.. the coding is so bad.. its so annoying. you end up almost having to recode the whole thing. I have a Jenny so I dont have to do that … everyone should get a jenny.
Thanks so much Wendy for pointing me in the right direction. I ended up using one of Brian Gardner’s themes recommended by Ponn but I finally have my blog post titles in the right order! I’m so excited
Tammy
Wendy, I just got the Cutline theme for my other blog at goblain.com, and it is awesome!! I bet really look forward to watching the organic traffic increase
I love Cutline as well and I use it on almost every site a I create. It is so easy to modify and create your own unique look and feel.
Thanks for sifting through the sea of WordPress themes for us, Wendy. This will help me with ideas for my new project…which will remain “new” until I finally get on the ball. I need to read your Monday Motivation more often.
Wendy, the night I was e-mailing you back and forth I signed up with blue host BUT have not been able to get a new theme uploaded. I tried cutline and time managment and neither is working. Is there anyone out there who can help me? I left a message on the cutline post and it still has not been seen. I think moving to wordpress.org is pushing me out of my comfort zone even more but I am convinced that I will succeed. I want this up and running with ads…
Sue, did you unzip those files and then upload them to the server with BlueHost’s FTP program?
Also, WordPress Tutorials has a large section of free videos, which may be helpful for you as you get started (they also have paid ones, but the free ones will get you pretty far).
I used MistyLook but I had to do a lot of work to first, make it look the way a want it, second, to make it search frendly. But I think I did a pretty good job. It looks nice and after 6 weeks I’m alredy getting some traffic from both Yahoo and Google.