You're half right. It is just good design, but it is good, well optimized for search engines design. It's one thing to design a good page layout and write good

You're half right. It is just good design, but it is good, well optimized for search engines design. It's one thing to design a good page layout and write good content, but it's a whole different beast to really look at a how a spider is crawling your site or what people are actually searching for and optimizing for that. For example, if I wrote a really good, useful article about how to lose weight, but in doing research came to find out that people search for "weight loss" 5 times more than "how to lose weight", then it would be beneficial to both my site and to searchers for me to retool my content to match the high volume keyword to target the largest amount of searchers possible. Without proper research, I would never have known to do something like that. The articles fundamental knowledge remains the same, I just am getting it in front of more people who care. Additionally, things like proper linking structure and content hierarchy is somewhat comparable to things like database architecture. You could toss everything into a mess of tables with random columns and call it a day, or you can sit down and really map things out in a logical and efficient way not only for performance but also for usability.