Search Engine Optimization and CSS - Easy Updates and Resource Management
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6. Simplifies Updates
This actually may mean more to the webmaster, but it has value for the SEO professional as well. If content is easier to access, chances are it will be updated more frequently. Updated content adds freshness to the pages of the website, and freshness is important to search engines.
Along the same lines, when colors or fonts need to be changed, they only need to be altered once in the CSS code, versus revised in every HTML page. And while this holds little real SEO value directly, it is worth mentioning, because indirectly, it allows more time for the webmaster to add or update the important things to his site, such as content and headlines.
7. HTML Code Should Be Tidy
I mentioned this early on in the article, because it is a pet peeve of mine. I keep a page from one of my early websites around for laughs. The code is so awful, I still can’t make heads or tails of all the font, borders, table, and form tags, and it is 62 kilobytes in size. More than just a personal preference, clear cut HTML makes for easier development for the next web designer, or to make changes to content. Being able to find your way around someone else’s code is important to new inductees having to look at a page for the first time. Being able to find their way around makes it easier for proofreading, editing, updating content, and fixing site issues that may prevent spidering or ranking well.
A site designed properly with CSS and XHTML can avoid incorporating any design element in the actual HTML. Let’s look out our two example pages again. The HTML page is 608 lines long; whereas, the page designed with CSS is only 130 lines long. It is much easier to find your way around in the page that contains 130 lines than it is in the one with over 600 lines.
8. Better Use of Browser Cache and Server Resources
You can use CSS to design your page elements, like background images, multiple fonts and colors, or even many divisions with their own individual style. Once the external style sheet loads the first time, it is stored in the browser’s cache. Then, when the subsequent pages are called, the browser does not have to render the linked style sheet over and over, so the pages load faster.
In an HTML page with a table layout, the browser must retrieve, analyze, and render each page one by one, meaning the browser is laboring just as much at displaying the 10 th or 20 th page in your website as it was when displaying the first page. Even if an HTML page is not using complicated tables, the browser still has to analyze the code before rendering the page, so retrieving all those deprecated font tags could have an effect on both how quickly the page loads, and server performance.
Search engine spiders like to crawl multiple pages of a site at a time, following all the links in a site, (unless instructed against them in the robots.txt file), but if a spider has to work harder to analyze the code to find the real content, this could also increase server load. This affects memory, CPU usage, and page file capabilities of a web server. Slowing the spider down due to poor server performance could affect how many pages get indexed at that time, not to mention the possibility of the spider just giving up and leaving the site.
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