CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) can be useful when optimizing your site for search engines. Some of the more common SEO uses are:
- Ability to place your most important text and keywords near the top of the code, yet still display the text anywhere on your page, enabling the spiders to see the most important parts of the page first. Check out http://webmonkey.wired.com/webmonkey/html/97/25/index2a.html for help in understanding how to use absolute positioning to accomplish this.
- Change the style of important tags, especially H1, H2, etc. so that they fit more nicely into the design of your site. See the examples below of how to change the properties of header tags.
- Avoid the use of nested tables, thereby reducing file size, and creating cleaner code that search engines can follow easily
Example of header styles:
H1{font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; color: #ff0000; font-weight: bold; display: inline;}
H2{font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; color: #0000ff; font-weight: bold; display: inline;}
Note: display: inline allows you to get rid of the large break after a header tag, so you can control how much space you want between it and the next line of text.
Finally, for a good tutorial on learning CSS, check out http://www.w3.org/Style/Examples/011/firstcss.en.html
Using CSS is yet another useful tool in your search engine optimization toolbox.
