In the past all Word-press themes seem to look the same; you know the kind, a real basic design with the obligatory list of most recent posts on the homepage and your tags and calendar in your side-bars.

Nowadays however some of the wordpress themes being released for free (or open source) have been built very well in terms of design, but also in terms of their content mark, which often helps our SEO results.

The current trend for professional word-press themes include the following:

• JQuery or similar Content Sliders
• Featured posts on Homepage
• Tabbed side-bars
• Post lists with showcase images
• Prominent RSS feeds
• Social Media buttons
• Sophisticated designs

Content Sliders (JQuery etc)

By embedding JQuery or another java script library into the wordpress theme, allows designers to setup content sliders which show multiple pieces of content either by clicking the corresponding number or automatically. In most cases the slider uses a custom image for the post with some including a small amount of text from the posting onto of the image.

Featured Posts on Homepage

By featuring specific posts on your homepage, it allows your website or blog to stay fresh with updated content. In some ways this functionality allows you to syndicate all the content throughout your site onto your homepage therefore increase your exposure into the major search engines. It also allows you to present an exciting mix of content for your visitors in an appealing manner.

Tabbed Side-bars

One of the key benefits of using Javascript to hide and show elements, such as tabbed side-bars is the fact that all content is visible to search engines. If you add to this the AJAX type feel that most of this tabbed side-bars offer, clearly you can see the benefit of this both in terms of usability but also SEO.

Post Lists with showcase images

As we know an image is worth a thousand words, and hence any list which also has a featured image will be more appealing and potentially more informative than a bare bones list.

Prominent RSS Feeds

Most modern wordpress theme designers understand the benefits of your RSS feed and therefore offer a RSS button normally in a propiment position usually found on your home-page.

Social Media Buttons

Anyone that truly understands SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) or SEM (Search Engine Marketing) understands the benefits that can be achieved using Social media such as Facebook or Twitter. By posting your content into these social media spaces it will not only increase the number of places (on the internet) that you’re content can be found, but will also increase the number of visitors coming to your website as Google will increase your page rank due to the number of incoming links.

Sophisticated Designs

As mentioned earlier, the early free word-press themes were pretty basic to put it bluntly! In the last few years however the designs being done for free themes have come on leaps and bounds. If you compare some professional news sites (such as BBC or CNN) and then take a look at some of latest free wordpress sites for news and magazines, you will no doubt see how professional these designs really are.

Incidently, the design for nCoded was initially designed to replicate the old BBC news websites; which incidently is part of the reason why the SEO on ncoded.com is so good.

You can also take a look at 10 of the best wordpress themes for 2011