Search Engine Optimization and CSS
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I am all about Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS. As an SEO consultant, I find they are perfect for optimization purposes. There are truly no limitations of CSS that should keep an SEO from utilizing style sheets for presentational elements instead of putting it all into HTML.
I love CSS, because I hate font tags in my html, and I truly despise tables. I’m a very organized person, and everything has to be in its place; so when my code is all untidy, it makes me uneasy. It makes me feel the same as when I have a lot of junk mail piled up all over the office, or when it’s time to clean out the garage.
There are actually many reasons while I like external style sheets so much. Part of effective SEO contains the following elements that can be addressed by utilizing external style sheets: maintaining a good content to code ratio, using lots of relevant content, and filling the page with as much text and links as you can without spamming the search engine spiders.
Before I enumerate the ways CSS is beneficial in search engine optimization, understanding a little bit about what a search engine spider sees when scanning a page is important. Search engines read pages like you and I do, from top to bottom. It also assumes that the content near the top of the page is more important than the content at the bottom of the page. The text at the top of a page receives more weight than the text at the bottom.
I’m not going to cover the basics of XHTML (Extensible HyperText Markup Language) or CSS, because that’s not what this article is about. I’m going to assume that you have at least a rudimentary knowledge of CSS and XHTML. If not, there are hundreds of helpful CSS tutorials on the internet. One particularly good set of tutorials on CSS is Cascading Style Sheets in Dev Articles.
Another website to start learning about CSS is the place where it all came about: The World Wide Web Consortium, or the W3C. Learn about XHMTL also at W3C’s website. Their tutorials will help you understand and recognize the difference between HTML and XHTML. For all intents and purposes, you don’t need to know much about CSS for this article to make some sense to you, although it will be extremely helpful.
So why use CSS? Here are several ways that will help you understand how CSS is an appropriate SEO tool.
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