What your site looks like to Google.
There’s a little coding language any serious web designer can’t live without… CSS.
Thats right Cascading Style Sheets or CSS have altered the world of web design and SEO. Before CSS became mainstream, many sites were built using tables and yes, this is exactly what it sounds like. Designers would dump the content of your site in columns and rows, which would form the basis of your site’s layout. Whats wrong with this? Well there were many problems, but the biggest had to be where it left your site in Google.
Downsides of using Tables
Building a site using tables to structure the layout leaves behind huge amounts of unorganised and useless code, basically a lot of <td>’s and <tr>’s, making it harder for search engines to crawl your site and any other sites built using pure CSS would soon start ranking above you. CSS has and can be included in sites built with tables to style things like the size and colour of text, however this does not remove the useless code tables can leave behind. It is only when a site’s layout is built using just CSS that this can happen.
Benefits of CSS
CSS enables you divide your site into different parts so you might have a header section and within this section you may have sub divisions for example, header left and header right. Now this might seem like a fancy way of drawing out a table, but the only code needed to reference these sections within the html document (the code read by Google) would be <div id=”header”>header content here</div> the rest would be up to the CSS file. In which, you could style this section to heaven if needs be, you can specify width, height, alignment, font size, letter spacing… PRETTY much everything you could wish for, and all this information would remain separate from the content read by the search engines.
By also using CSS to structure your layout you can structure where each piece of text appears in the code, this is called absolute positioning. This means that you can choose the most relevant information to appear at the very top of the code, making it the first thing read by the search engine.
January 2nd, 2009 at 8:40 pm
CSS is a very neat way of separating content and presentation for websites. At the very least it allows the site to be reskinned easily. Having said that there are so many table-based websites out there that if Google wasn’t a master at parsing them they’d be missing a lot of good content for their users.