SEO Step By Step Guide– 81. How Can CSS Help SEO in Times of Design Change?

Do you have a CSS based website? If not it is high time that you convert your design into CSS based design and when you do so make sure that it is external CSS. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. CSS ensures cleaner HTML pages; all the design related clutter and formatting styles can be separated from the actual content of your web pages. All formatting related information will be put in the css file. Using CSS, you can create fast loading websites. Because most of the information is stored externally. You will be able to move up the most important content of your website to the top, which is not possible without CSS. If your web pages are filled with coding information search engines have to dig deep to find the actual content of the page and it may not do well always to reach the end of the page to find the entire content. CSS helps your site a great deal in making it search engine friendly.

Now in times of web design change how does CSS help? Since all the design related information is store externally, we can implement most of the changes that we need without affecting the existing pages. If you leave the existing, content in tact and change only the design part, your ranking by far will not be affected. Changing your website’s design or the skin is much easier, faster and safer in terms of SEO. You do not have to make the changes for the individual pages; using style sheets you can affect changes globally. This ensures minimum changes in the actual web pages. Therefore, it is always good to use external CSS for your website. It will help your website in general by making it SEO friendly and at the same time when you want to make design related changes; you will be able to implement your changes without affecting your current site’s ranking. You can indeed improve your ranking by fine tuning your website’s design and making it more search engine friendly.

When you use CSS, the size of each page reduces drastically and this will ensure that your pages are loaded fast and it is a known fact that search engines like fast loading pages as opposed to pages that are heavy laden with graphics and flash. So migrate to CSS and do yourself a favor. As much as keyword density is important, position of the keywords in the webpage is also equally important. Therefore, when you implement design changes, your keywords are bound to change in terms of position of the keywords. When you use CSS based design, the content will be locked more or less to the same position as long as the site’s layout is retained. Take advantage of the benefits that you can derive from CSS.

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