In SEO a very important aspect of any On-page optimization is Clean Code. Search engine robots or spiders see your website code and we humans see content and design directly.

By using CSS (cascading style sheets) you can enhance your website SEO in a major way

Let’s see how we can do SEO with CSS

• Rapid Loading Web Sites
  One of the foremost reason you should use CSS is because, it makes the webpage lighter. If coded properly it will significantly cut down the weight of your webpage and will remove any unwanted html code. This in turn would make it easier for the search engine spiders, to crawl the website, and lead to better and faster indexing of your website. It will also positively facilitate ‘content to code ratio’ which is very important in SEO
• Content on Top of webpage
  Now, let me tell you something about how search engine spiders crawl websites, they read websites top to bottom. Having your most important content with keywords embedded on top of the webpage, helps your website to rank higher for your major keywords. You can achieve this by using “absolute” tag

Download this ready to use SEO CSS layouts which you can use while developing your website

You can also download SEO layouts from http://layouts.ironmyers.com/ they have a variety of tableless layouts available for download

• Headlines – H1 /H2 tags instead of ugly <font> tag
  H1-H6 tags or heading tags if used correctly it can boost your rankings. But I know they don’t look as cool as your <font> styling. With CSS you can tweak how H1 tags render your headings. You can change font size, color, give borders, backgrounds etc

Here is a little example of how cool heading can look and at the same time it helps in boosting SERP

<h1 class=”h1″>Custom HEADING using CSS</h1>

.h1 {
color: #000;
font-size: 110%;
border-bottom-width: 3px;
border-bottom-style: dashed;
border-bottom-color: #FC0;
font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;
font-weight: bold;
padding-bottom: 4px;
background-image: url(icon.gif);
background-repeat: no-repeat;
background-position: left 2px;
padding-top: 12px;
padding-left: 30px;
background-color: #FFFFD9;
}

• SEO Friendly navigation
  Your website’s internal link structure plays a very crucial role in SEO, as it helps pages   to get indexed quickly and having your keywords hyperlinked increases the relevancy between pages. Also it’s really important for your visitors to navigate your site in just few clicks. A good SEO navigation can help you achieve high rankings in search engines. I recommend using pure CSS menus instead of using crappy JavaScript / Table menus

You can download some really cool SEO friendly CSS menus that I have developed. Just play around with CSS and you can change the style of these menus as per your website design

• Ease of maintenance a real time saver
  Yes by using CSS you can maintain your site efficiently and swiftly. Time is money, and CSS not only helps your site rank higher in search engines but it also saves your much valuable time.In a scenario where you decide that you want to change the text color and background color of your header, if your site is coded the old fashioned way without CSS, then you will have to edit each and every page of your website and make the needed changes. However if you are using CSS, with a slight change in the tag and all your pages gets updated in the desired manner, instantly.

Wrong CSS techniques that will result in getting your site banned in search engines

Using CSS to hide keywords/text

Many webmasters use Black Hat SEO techniques. Hiding keywords from users through CSS will definitely get you into trouble. Search engines read that text, but it also detects that the text is hidden from users, which could get your site banned.

I have stated some of the important benefits of using Cascading Style Sheets. If you have some of them to share, please use the comment form below.

An average user while searching for something in search engine doesn’t go through more than top 20 to 30 results to get the information. If your website doesn’t feature amongst top search results than you can simply kiss traffic goodbye.

Therefore when a relevant keyword or key phrase is searched in major search engines like Google, MSN, Yahoo etc you need to get your website rank higher so you get more visitors and better your chances to convert them to customers.

There are many factors that affects your website ranking in search engines, Content, Relevance, Coding, Structure, Link popularity could be some of the factors preventing search engine spiders to spider your site properly.

Watch this space to learn more about different aspects of search engine optimization, the seo process and do-it-yourself search engine tutorials.