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Search Engine Optimisation Training Course
Lesson No.8 -
Cascading Style Sheet Design
by Bruce Gow Search Engine Guy Pty Ltd
http://www.searchengine-guy.com.au
Developing a SEO friendly framework
Although more related to web design than SEO, it is important for you to
understand some basics of HTML and other related languages if you really want to
improve your SEO work.
Whether you are going to implement the changes yourself or get a competent web
designer to put your site together, the information we are going to discuss will
have a tremendous impact on your on-page SEO.
What Are Cascading Style Sheets?
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a fairly new method of formatting and styling
the content of your pages.
Traditional HTML pages were quite limited in what you
could personalize on page and how you could customize and style your design.
All to this has changed with the introduction of CSS;
you can now customize as many elements of your content as you wish!
Not only does CSS allow for much nicer web designs, it also
allows much neater code as search engines don’t read cascading style sheets.
Cascading Style Sheets are the best method to show ethically one thing to the
search engines, and another one for the human visitors, this way you have an
optimized page both for the search engines and your visitors!
How Cascading Style Sheets Work?
Cascading Style Sheets work differently; instead consider each styling
information as a new “layer” that you apply on top of the previous one:
While the search engines will see the basic non styled page containing all what they need to know, the visitors will be greeted with a
pleasant layout and overall design.
Faster Loading Of Your Page
There are many reasons as to why CSS allows your pages to load faster, the fact of having shorter neater code makes a lot of difference
by itself.
Not only that, but having images loading as a styling sheet instead of inline
content (except for your image links) remove all their unnecessary cluttering
code work out of your pages, and doesn’t require your browser to load the images
first, as they will be applied later through styling.
Optimal Positioning Of Your Content
All the previous elements I talked about are important because the less junk
code the search engines spiders have to go through; the easier it is for them to
identify what is important in your page.
Spiders are not very smart and thus only read from top to bottom; with the
understanding that the more a content is placed towards the top, the more
important it is, and the more it is placed towards the bottom, the less
important it is too.
Basically this is the order in which the search engines spiders
read and evaluate the content of your pages:
1. Most Important – Header
2. Important – Sidebar
3. Not so Important – Menu
4. Not Important – Content
5. Least Important – Page Footer
That may work for the search engines, but certainly not for your visitors!
This is where comes the real beauty of CSS, you can not only edit and design
styles in colours and images, but also in positioning!
That’s right, CSS allows you to decide the order in which the search engines are
going to read the content of your pages, as well as allow your visitors to enjoy
a great web design!
Exercise
Map out a potential site layout that you think would be interesting for you, and
define in which order you’d like each block to appear.
If you have knowledge about CSS yourself, you’ll then be able to implement such
changes yourself, if not, you’ll have to make sure that your web designer
follows your instructions as he develop your site.
Again, another reason not to rush by getting your site built too soon, knowing
this from the start will save you huge amount of time in not having to modify
over and over your template, as well saving you tremendous money and stress with
the web design firm you hired to do the job.
1. Learn How
to Sort Out the Competition
2. Do
Your Keyword Research Homework
3. Refining
Your Keywords
4.
Evaluating Ranking Difficulty
5.
Mapping Your Site Structure
6.
Understanding Links & PageRank
7. Sculpting Your Site Structure
8. Cascading Style Sheet
Design
9. Using Wordpress
for SEO
10.
Setting up Your Analytics
11.
Engineering the Title Tag
12.
Optimising The Content
13.
Optimising The Description Tag
14.
Building Internal Links
15.
SEO & Images
16.
OnPage Analysis Using IBP
17.
Link Building 101
18.
Beating Your Competition
19.
Building External Links
20.
Using Structured SEO
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