Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) In Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

CSS stand for Cascading Style Sheet. CSS is a breakthrough in web design because it allows developers to control the style and layout of multiple Web pages all at once. As a Web developer you can define a style for each HTML element and apply it to as many Web pages as you want. To make a global change, simply change the style, and all elements in the Web are updated automatically.

Though it hasn't replaced tables in webdesign, it can be used in combination with 'tables' and 'div' to get optimum result in respect of web design as well as search engine optimization. It never means that you cannot prepare a website without using tables. I have done that. I built a complete website that had no tables, td's and tr's. It was all in CSS.

A natural question arises that why should we go more for CSS than tables. As far as web design and development are concerned CSS provide a centralised control on same styles used in different pages. It mean when the web site developers and designers will need to change any style they will change it in the external css file and it will be automatically replaced in all pages, rather than finding and replacing in all pages. It is much more useful than just having a centralised control.

Now let us reveal the importance of CSS in search engine optimization. The search engine spiders see a more of useful content compared to table designs, thus making the page more attractive for spiders and robots. It may lead to higher search engine rankings in most cases unless you are using some other offensive seo techniques.

CSS make the code more cleaner keeping the size of file small. A lighter website will save massive amount of bandwidth over time. Secondly, a light website will take less time to get downloaded by users thus making access to the site more fast and efficient.

CSS is a modern web design and developemnt technique and is being preffered by most of the web design and developemt company and some search engine optimization companies especially those who believes in providing optimum services. CSS is an effort to make website more search engine friendly. Once understood properly it does not take much time to buid a CSS based website.

Search Engine Optimization TRUTHS

A merciless truth is that many web owners do not build SEO compatible website. Now let us discuss what exactly is SEO compatible website. A known phrase suggests that 'Precaution is better than cure!!'

Now a days, a lot may website is emerging. Many of them uses flash, frames etc. While discussing this topic I'ld be drawing your attention to few simple steps that should be taken care of while developing any website.

Keywords Analysis - Choose right set of keywords

Often people choose a very wide range of keywords for optimization, like occasionally I have seen few online travel agent companie optimizing their web site for keywords like 'travel', 'flights', 'hotels', 'vacations' etc. The keywords are not incorrect but highly generalised. For example, the keyword 'flight' could have a highly competitive, so it'll take a very long route to get alisting on this keyword. To cut it short, suppose I get a ranking on 'flight', now what? The customer might come to my site looking for a flight to Africa, but I may be providing flights only in Europe. So what would be my correct set of keywords? Naturally it wont be 'flights' only, but ofcourse it could be 'flights to amsterdam' or 'flights to london' etc. Thus it is very important and first step to choose correct set of keywords to optimize a site. This is a very sensitive part of optimization and is called keyword analysis. You may also contact some search engine optimization company, which can do this keyword analysis for you.

On Page Optimization

Many of you are well aware of on page optimization. Those who are new to this let me explain first what is on page optimization. It is the process in which we optimize our web page during the design process. It includes the changes we do ON page to make it more serach engine friendly. The process of on page optimization includes preparing title and meta tags. You can get a detail article on 'how to create search engine friendly title and meta tags?' in some other post of this blog.

Content Writing and Optimization

While writing content for your website, you must ensure that you write keyword rich and optimum stuffed content. Too much stuffing of keywords in content is also bnot preferrable. It is considered as spamming. The correct amount of keywords in a page content should be around 3 to 5 % of total words. These keywords should be equally distributed on whole page rather than being stuffed in one paragraph. A well written content attracts search engine. Specially Googlebot is considered quite hungry and curious for updated content. You can get you content written by some professional content writers who writes well optimized contents. Many SEO company in India offers this service at cheaper rates.

Well made SEO friendly website will be more liked and loved by our three infamous search engines...Google, MSN and Yahoo. So let us make a search engine friendly website by following above steps. A search engine friendly website will get faster traffic. And when I say traffic, I mean relevant traffic. It will get easily cached and regularly crawled. It will alos get high search engine rankings in comparitively lesser time.