SEO-it Article: CSS, helping with SEO?

Using CSS to maintain clean, efficient code that flags certain data is an invitation to robots that index your site, and they'll love you for it. It'll also help you with site maintenance, it really will!

What Is CSS?

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are a language used to describe how a HTML document should be formatted and correct CSS usage can be a clear indication to the efficiency of your website.

So, a document that does nothing but explain to your web browser how to display the information in the HTML document shouldn't be something that a search engine would care about, should it

CSS Relevance

Well, it's not about the CSS itself, but what good usage of CSS does to your HTML document that's important. Search engines like to read the content of your site, they want to identify the key areas and use this to index your listing.

If your page formatting and style is all contained within the HTML code, such as using font-tags, tables for layout and so forth, this makes the code messy and doesn't help the search engines get straight to the good bits.

Using specific tags for certain information will not only highlight clearly for your visitors, but will indicate to search engines where the best data is. An example of this would be the first header tag <h1>, it specifies the main header for a page's content. If your page title matches this header tag, you're onto a winner already as it's a clear indication as to what's going on.

Now, keeping things efficient, you may have a header tag, but want it a bigger font size, underlined and bright green for example. Then use your CSS script to define this, then the search engines don't need to fiddle around, but can skip straight to the information they need.

Efficiency

An added bonus of using a CSS script is that make this once and all of your pages can be formatted the same, make a change, and it's only done in one place. The SEO-it website uses CSS for it's formatting, to turn it off scroll to the bottom of any page and click the ‘text only' link, the core information is revealed. Press F5 (or click the page refresh button) to get everything back to normal.

So, why not implement an element of good design practice, it's only going to help, and help everyone!

Good Luck!
Team SEO-it.co.uk