Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS for short, are extremely powerful development tools. They allow you to define global styles for any page element. these styles are reusable, making the page more consistent looking and easier to maintain. CSS allows developers to manage not only font, color, and size, but also position and visibility.
Here are some great SEO hints about CSS:
- Storing CSS in separate files keeps content closer to the top of the page
- Development techniques, like a table-less layout, that leverages CSS put all the CSS into an external file, will have many benefits:
- Make the pages load faster, since it does not need to draw tables, etc.
- Increase the content to code ratio
- Place the content closer to the top of the page
- Put the content closer together
- And thus make the content easier to be indexed by a spider
- Lowers code complexity, decreasing the chance of improperly formed HTM and other page errors
- CSS will also give the designers of the page the ability to reorder content, and list content blocks in order of importance. So for example, if the header should appear first on the page to the user, but is the least relevant for search engines, it can appear lower within the code and have more SEO relevant content (such as H1 tags, etc) closer to the top.
- There are lots of other benefits to using CSS that are not as much related to SEO a they are good design practices:
- The site becomes easier to maintain, as the decoration is independent of the actual content copy
- Better browser caching and server resources
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