Design and Layout

The design and layout of your site determines how it appears to the end user. This is important because Google is ultimately driven by a user-first philosophy. Web pages that satisfy the user’s need first, fastest and in the simplest possible way are rewarded with higher SERP rankings.

Your site’s design and layout also determines how easily web crawlers, such as Google bot, crawl and index it. A simple and optimized design and layout means fast and easy crawling, which in turn translates into better rankings.

2.1.2 Challenges Publishers Face With Design and Layout

So what stops publishers from implementing design and layout best practices? Most often, publishers are confronted by these pain points:

• Ambiguity over what results can are feasible
• Uncertainty over skill set requirements
• Ambiguity over resource requirements

2.1.3 Does Design and Layout Matter for SEO?

To answer this question, we performed a simple Google search entering the keywords “Charlie Puth News” into the search bar.

Here’s what the search results turned up:

At number two on the Top Stories SERP ranking, right above a story by NME, is the Daily Illini’s article on Charlie Puth’s latest release.

The fact that the Daily Illini, a university student newspaper, outranks the world’s biggest standalone music website, raises some important questions

How is a student newspaper in a town of some 40,000 inhabitants in the American midwest outranking the largest music news website on earth? Intrigued, we decide to dig around a little more.

First we checked out NME’s page on Charlie Puth.