Search Engine Optimization can be a very difficult and tedious thing to master. Doing a search for “SEO” will produce an overwhelming wealth of information. Whether this information is free or has a price, the majority of it covers the same basic fundamentals of how to improve your position in the search engine rankings:
1.Keyword Selection
2.Keyword Density
3.Inbound and Outbound Links
4.Inlinking (links to pages within your own site)
I won’t go into detail on these topics in this article because I'd like to discuss another topic.
The other topic that I’d like to discuss is one that is often debated but seldom explained: “The Markup of Marketing”.
“Markup” is the HTML “code” that makes up the structure and formatting of your web page(s). However you create that HTML doesn’t matter. The end result, your website, is still simply HTML markup. You can do many things to format and style your web page(s) using images, videos and CSS.
This is where the debate comes in. Many people ask whether CSS can help optimize a page or site for better Search Engine positioning. The point of this article is to answer that question with a firm – YES.
To help illustrate this, I would like to cover 2 of the often overlooked and/or under utilized SEO techniques. Those techniques are as follows:
1.Clean Markup:
Clean markup is a very important factor in your pages ability to be indexed properly. It’s pretty common knowledge that “un-clean” or “broken” code can cause problems for your web page(s). What may not be common knowledge is how negatively “unclean” or “broken” code can affect your page(s) in regards to search engines.
If your website has a large amount of unclean or broken code (un-closed table tags, tr’s, td’s, etc.) most browsers are very forgiving and will render your page(s) as close to correct as possible. Most search engines, on the other hand, are not as forgiving. If a search engine spider encounters large amounts of broken code, it can’t decipher your page and will often abandon it.
HTML makes it very easy to end up with unclean markup. This is because HTML was intended for tabular data, making an intricate design (and often times, a not-so-intricate design) difficult to layout. To ensure that your design will be rendered correctly using HTML, you are often required to add an excessive amount of table and formatting tags. This creates the perfect opportunity to forget to close a tag, or two, or three…
This broken code can make it difficult for search engine spiders to understand your page(s) and even more difficult to determine the hierarchical structure of your page(s).
This is where CSS lends a big helping hand. By using CSS, you can reduce the amount of tags used to create the pages in your website. CSS allows you to store all of the details regarding the presentation of your site in a separate file, affording you two major advantages:
1.Unnecessary markup regarding colors, fonts, sizes etc. doesn’t have to clutter your HTML.
2.Without having to add the specific markup for each element in your page(s), you can focus on the structure and content of your page. This can greatly reduce the opportunity for unclean code.
Clean code provides another added benefit: File Size. Reducing the code not only makes it easier for search engine spiders to read your page(s), it also reduces the file size. This allows your page to load faster. Your dial-up prospects will like that.
2.Content Positioning:
Learning to position your content is a surprisingly easy thing to do with CSS. I won’t go into the details of that in this article because Id like to first discuss why it is useful.
Search Engines read your page(s) the same way that we are supposed to read a book: top-left to bottom-right. Most web pages however, are designed to be scanned quickly. We like to add a nice graphical header with our logo to catch the eye, display our keywords in a fancy font or bright color at various places on the page, add videos and images, and more. There is nothing wrong with this unless you are using HTML.
Since HTML is intended for tabular data, you are forced to markup your content, as it should appear on your page. If you want your content to display between a left and right column, all under your nice header, you are forced to markup your page as such. When a search engine spider visits your page it has to read your header, your entire left column and anything else that had to be coded before your content before it can determine what your site is about. At this point, your content isn’t given much importance.
This is where CSS can provide an enormous benefit to your SEO efforts. Using CSS, you can position your keyword rich content (that you worked so hard on, or paid so much for) at the top of the page in your markup, but display it visually wherever you’d like. You can, in effect, position your content anywhere in your markup without changing how your page is displayed visually.
This means that all of your important content can be placed at the top of your markup where search engines weigh it with more importance.
Using these two simple techniques with an eye-catching design and all of your other SEO efforts can prove to be an effective Search Engine Marketing campaign.
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(c) Davey Montooth
Davey Montooth is a Web Designer/Developer with a focus on standards based design and SEO.
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CSS and SEO - The Markup of Marketing
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