SEO and CSS (Part 1)

On-page SEO may not get the same press these days as the various schemes and plans designed to secure inbound links, but it’s still a critical part of climbing the SERPs. One of the best on-page decisions you can make with respect to SEO is utilizing Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS.

As we’ll discuss, this on-page element has SEO repercussions in terms of on-page and off-page SEO.

CSS is a style sheet language that sets out the presentation of a document. In the case of most websites, that means that the CSS handles the formatting of your HTML or XHTML, though it can have application to different mark up languages, too.

CSS was apparently invented back in 1997, but we’ve only really seen its rise to prominence over the past few years. There are many different reasons to like it. It allows for quick, consistent formatting across an entire website. If you decide to make a change in appearance sitewide, you can effectuate the alteration by changing the CSS alone. It also tends to aid quicker loading times for pages (particularly when charts or similar information are involved). In the past couple of years we’ve seen CSS go from “neat idea” to something approaching standard operating procedure.

The benefits of the Cascading Style Sheets aren’t limited to presentation and editing, though. They offer some real benefits in terms of search engine optimization, too.

Before we look at the on-page perks of using CSS, let’s consider a roundabout way that it can aid in SEO. By making site construction, editing and content addition easier and more efficient, it frees up more time to handle other tasks. That means that a CSS user will be able to free up time to do more of the things that make search engines fall in love with websites. CSS is an SEO winner in the time management sense, as Stone Temple Consulting notes:

Using CSS can make it faster and easier to maintain your web site. Helping make the webmastering task easier may also make it possible for you to spend more time doing things that improve your site from a search engine optimization and search engine marketing perspective.

Now that we’ve discussed what CSS is all about and how it can free up time for other SEO tasks, we can take a look at the very real on-page advantages it offers in terms of search engine friendliness. We’ll do that in our next post.