Using CSS for SEO

Or, to get rid of the alphabet soup jargon, can Cascading Style Sheets be used to benefit Search Engine Optimization? The answer is yes.

We all know, or should know, that CSS is very beneficial for design and maintenance of a blog site. Taken a step further, CSS can also be used to fine-tune a page to be more spider friendly. In other words, a page that is designed to be indexed to maximize key words and phrases that you want to emphasize.

A very good discussion of this appears on OutFront which is a site I visit frequently. CSS can reduce the code on a page for starters. Beyond that, "CSS makes it possible to position content pretty much wherever you like in the code without affecting the appearance of the page, so that your important content is higher on the page, which to a search engine means it is more important. For example you can have your header appear on the top of a page, but be at the bottom in the code, which means the opening H1 of your content (very important to search engines) is right at the top."

There are other ways CSS can be utilized for SEO, but just the control over placement on your page is reason enough to get on the CSS bandwagon.