Most of us are more interested in SEO [Search Engine Optimization] or making our blog’s look good in search engines. Here is some some good tips for you! Using CSS and XHTML is actually very beneficial to your SEO standings. Four different ways that using CSS can help you improve your search engine optimization are listed below. Some of them happen automatically, while others require you make decisions.
Rationalized XHTML : When we want our page to be SEO friendly we have to take care about the SIZE and LOCATION of your pages. Mostly the content which appears towards the bottom of your page won’t be treated as “important” as the content which appears at the top of the page, your page is significantly long.
The important thing is the “length” of the page is determined by the quantity of code, not by the amount of content (text, etc). If you have a lot of stuff at the top of the page, before the actual content, the search engine might not think of your site/blog as a significant one.
Controlled Code : Whatever be the look of your design and the display of the page, when it comes to search engine optimization, it’s what’s underneath that really counts. No Search engine scans your page visually… based on the code they stitch together a page. And you may discover that if you page relies on a table-based design, it might not be “read” quite the way you expected.
Take the image above, for example. A search engine would read this page just like any other table: from top left to bottom right. It would read everything in the header, everything in the navigation, and everything in the sidebar before it gets to the content. And if your navigation and sidebar are the same on every page, you’re going to take a negative hit in search engines for having a lot of duplicate content up front.
But, when you’re working with CSS, you can organize your code any which way you wish. You can make sure your valuable, keyword-rich content is right up near the top of your XHTML, and push your sidebar into a div down below your content area. Your CSS can put your sidebar anywhere you want or need visually…. and it won’t change Google’s reading of your website one iota.
Headings Make a Difference : If you are really worried about SEO ranking of your page, you should be worried about your code. It’s what’s underneath that counts when it’s a search engine browsing your page – the visuals doesn’t matter at all. To that end, make sure you’re using good, old-fashioned heading tags (<h1> – <h6>) for all of your documents headings instead of just styling paragraphs or some other element with font tags, or even CSS.
Google doesn’t mind if your headings are 30-points tall and fuchsia (even if your other readers do).
Emphasize, Emphasize, Emphasize…. : Apart from the bodl headings, search engines also looks for a few other tags in you code to determine the important words on a page. Google, as it knows, tends to treat words wrapped in <strong> and <em> tags as more significant than their surrounding text. You can see pages with randomly bold-faced or italicized word spread in sometimes in some sites – they are trying to help Google find the important words in their pages and thereby boosting there SEO
But there is no need for those words to be visible to everyone. We can use CSS to ensure that search engines understand which words are more important, without having to annoy our readers with our strong-em tags. If we just take some XHTML like this:
<strong>keywords</strong> of
<em>significant importance</em>.
Append it with a new “SHOWIT” CSS class:
<strong class=”SHOWIT”>keywords</strong> of
<em class=”SHOWIT”>significant importance</em>.
And then write a simple CSS rule like this:
font-weight: normal;
font-style: normal; }
This way you can prevent your strong and em tags from being bold or italicized on the screen. However, search engines will still recognize the significance of those tags.
CSS and SEO are very much related together. You can always boost your SEO through proper use of CSS and HTML tags. Controlled used of code in your page always help you to get you pages/site listed prominently on Search Engines.
