SEO Step By Step Guide– 135. Using XHTML and CSS to Improve your SEO Efforts

When you use XHTML and CSS your web page’s readability will be enhanced. Search engine spiders will be able to parse through your web pages much more easily. Using XHTML and CSS will help you get good ration on content vs code. If your pages have too much of coding and the effective content very little in your web pages then you may have problems with your search engine ranking. Search engine spiders like web pages that maintain good code and content ratio in the web pages.

If your web pages have too much of coding, then the file size too will exceed. When the files are too huge then the loading time will increase. Search engines love fast loading web pages as opposed to heavily laden websites. All these are just basics that we need to take in to consideration and using XHTML and CSS will help us in getting better web pages in terms of content to code ratio and in term of page loading time.
When you set out to optimize your pages first make sure the entire page and the codes can be parsed by the search engines. By throwing in too much of coding in the beginning the spiders will not be able to readily categorize your web page on any of the common categories. Different search engines will have different levels of tolerance to the content to code ratio issues. To be on the safest site, it is better to have your coding separated into your CSS files. This will leave your pages neat with the active content.

The above approach will leave your pages more organized and the search engines will be able to drill down to the end of the page and index the entire content. If you have all the codes on top, then the spiders will index your pages only partially.

XHTML clearly defines the elements of your web page for instance, using the h1 and h2 tags will tell the spiders that it is the title of the page rather than using just HTML formatting to make the text look like the title. You can define how exactly your title or the h1 line will look in your css file. This is just one aspect of your web page. If you similarly remove all the other elements using XHTML and css stylesheet, your page will look clean and uncluttered.

You can also use your CSS styling to create some special effects such as rollovers while retaining lower file size. You should make use of every little help that you can get to achieve your ranking in the search engines. You cannot afford to miss the finer details because these finer details will cost you a great deal.

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