CSS or Cascading Style Sheets are most commonly used to style webpages that are written in HTML but it can be used to style just about any kind of XML document. CSS is used to describe the look and format of a document. CSS are mostly recognised for their contributions to building easily-modifiable and fast- loading webpages. CSS and SEO (search engine optimization) also have a close relationship though. CSS has been found to have quite strong SEO benefits.

How CSS Can Improve The SEO

The important thing that should be noted is that the location of information and the size of your web page matters quite a lot to search engines. For example, the information that is near the bottom of a long webpage will be considered significantly less important by search engines than the information near the top of the page.

Another important fact is that the size of the webpage is not determined by how much text you have placed on it but rather by the amount of code used. It is important that you understand this because if a search engine has to work through three hundred lines of nested tables that make up your top navigation before it has a chance to get to any of your content, then search engine may be considering the real content of your website to be insignificant.

The way that code is organized on your website is particularly important when it comes to CSS and SEO. For example if your sidebar or navigation code is the same and placed at the top of every page then search engine may read this as your website having a lot of duplicate information. This will negatively affect your websites ranking.

CSS allows you to arrange your code is any way you please. A good strategy would be to place your key content near the top of your XHTML and move your navigation and sidebar down below this. You can then still use CSS to place your navigation and sidebar anywhere that you would like it to be visually without affecting your ranking with search engine at all.