Working on the layout of your web site and making it better for visitors is also a key factor in Search Engine Optimization. It helps you to keep the visitor on your site and lead them through as many pages as possible. It will help you in the rankings because that visitor is not going to do his search again, after viewing only one page.
Google and other search engines track the behavior of searchers and how fast the searcher is coming back to search the same term again. If your visitor stays on your site for a long time, a message is sent to the search engine that says: "Hey, I found what I was looking for. This is a great site for that topic". This means you have won a small battle fought with the other sites on the same topic.
One thing you need to do is to make the site appealing to your visitor. You can accomplish this by choosing a layout and colors that fit their interest. As I mentioned before, setting the right colors for your audience is one way to start, but you need to take an extra step to get it really right.
Use a featured content box/module to highlight the articles that you think are important. Add some movement using flash banners if that is what fits your site and your site's topics. You can also use leading images—for instance, your blog post intro field. Adding these images and moving elements is a way to tell your visitors that you care about their experience on your site. It is also a way to express the effort you are putting in to show them the pictures you selected or created for them.
Using typography is another way that could make your site stand out and is coded into the template of your choice. Templates use CSS to ensure things such as headlines, menu listing, and other typographic elements to stand out. Use of these elements in the content of your articles is also a great way to lead people through the content.
We talked about making your pages scanable, and you can enhance that scanability by using classes that are built into the stylesheet of your template. Most editors have the option to select a style such as H3 or H2 that you can use to highlight a certain portion of your page. If you want to get into those options, check how an item such as "quote" shows up on your page. Using quotes is a nice way to break a long paragraph and it will attract the attention of your visitor.
The following is an example on how you can mix up your normal template, set typography, and add some extra elements such as bolding, H2, a drop letter element used for complete call to action, and an image to complete the page.
