Search Engine Optimization and CSS - Spider Food
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3. Easier to Read Content for Spiders
Search engine spiders are also affected when content is difficult to read. When a spider finds a page that is well organized and not filled with a lot of extra HTML code, it can ascertain quickly and accurately what that page is about. This can certainly improve your search engine ranking.
Contrary to popular belief, search engine spiders don’t completely ignore HTML code. Rather, it weighs certain elements of content on a web page by how they are represented in the HTML.
The best way to start optimizing a web site is to make sure that all the code is readable. If there is too much unnecessary text in your HTML, it is difficult for spiders to decide that a page is relevant to a particular search query. Improving your structural organization will not only make it easier to read for visitors, but ensure that search engine spiders understand what is being displayed.
Let’s use this example. Instead of placing this in your HTML code:
<strong><font face="Arial" color="#FF0000" size="24px">Search Engine Optimization and CSS</font></strong>
Use this in XHTML:
<h1>Search Engine Optimization and CSS</h1>
And this in your CSS:
h1 {
font-family: Arial;
size: 24px;
color: #FF0000;
font-weight: bold;
}
Using XHTML to declare your main heading as h1 will ensure that a search engine spider knows that the contained text is a title or sub-heading of the page, while styling it with CSS yields the desired design effect. Using header tags accordingly, SEO's can use this ideally to style the sub-headings on a website and clue in search engine spiders of their importance, especially when those sub-headings contain keywords. Header tags <h1> through <h6> tags seem to be given more weight than regular text. This is why even though our first example will look exactly the same as the second example visually to the human eye; to a search engine spider, the first example looks like regular text to it; whereas, the text contained in the <h1> and </h1> tags alerts the spider to the importance of the text as a sub-heading.
Most popular search engines, such as Google, MSN, and Yahoo, look for any intention to display one set of keyword-rich, yet hard-to-read, text to search engines, and another, more people-friendly version of the content to humans. When search engines detect this type of behavior, called cloaking, it is perceived as search engine spam, and they can penalize or even ban your site. While the belief is that search engines disregard an external style sheet, it is still important not to use CSS to spam the search engines. Content goes in HTML, whereas presentation elements should go in the CSS file, and that’s all.
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