Part of an effective SEO strategy is maintaining the right content-to-code ratio, using plenty of relevant content, and filling the page with as much text and as many links as possible without spamming the search engine spiders. Each of these tasks can be accomplished with external style sheets. Like people, search engines read pages from top to bottom and will assume that content at the top of the page is more important than the content at the bottom. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a presentation and accessibility-enhancement language that revolutionizes SEO marketing by styling a web page to feature keywords prominently, which will propel the page to the top of the result rankings.
Here are some reasons an SEO company must implement a CSS strategy.
Pages load faster
Web pages designed with CSS are much smaller than pages designed solely in HTML. These smaller pages load more quickly because there is less text to be rendered in the web browser and less code for a search engine spider to analyze. That’s why pages that are heavy in text and code are not as effective for search engine marketing as “lighter” pages are. Using less HTML will improve how well the search engines can parse the page when a visitor does a search.
CSS accommodates accessibility
CSS improves the ability of accessibility readers to comprehend the information contained in the web page. People who are visually impaired or have other disabilities use accessibility readers. Accessibility readers are tools that read code for the viewer and translate HTML into audio, extra-large text, or other formats by removing all HTML tags. Optimal use of CSS with HTML makes it unnecessary to strip out the HTML and eliminate the need to reorganize the content for readability.
Content is easier for spiders to read
Untidy HTML affects the search engine spiders’ ability to extract relevant information. When a spider finds a page that is well-organized and not filled with extra HTML code, it can tell what that page is about quickly and precisely. This can improve your search engine rankings.
Updates are simplified
Content that is easy for webmasters to access is also easy to update. Uncluttered code simplifies the updating process. A site with a fresh layout and current information will also be more appealing to the human eye.
Changes to a site’s layout are important to search engines, too. When colors or fonts need to be changed, CSS requires only that you alter them once in the CSS code rather than having to alter each HTML page. There is no substitute for quality content and presentation, but CSS does facilitate the effective and speedy overhaul of a website.
It’s clear that CSS simplifies the work of maintaining a website. From an SEO perspective, it is advisable to have CSS code placed in an external file and have a function to call the code on the page. This will assure that the page does not contain extra lines of code and will make it more spider-friendly.