Get to Know Why CSS is Good for Google

on Sep 1st 2009 with 7 comments

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a simple mechanism that helps you add style on the content of a web page together with fonts, colors, layouts and spacing. CSS also helps you have control over the layout and look of a web page. This mechanism is often called as ‘Separation of Content from Presentation‘.

If you do not understand CSS, you can not use it in your site. But learning CSS is always worth, whilst you get a load of advantages for your site. The advantages do not only confined to Google but has a bigger perspective. You might be struggling with yourself to know why CSS is good for Google. Below are the points explaining why CSS is good for Google:

CSS helps to develop smaller sized files
The amount of code in your web pages can be efficiently reduced by taking styles out of the HTML and putting it into CSS style sheets. Pages with lesser amount of code are smaller in file size. And Google, along with several other search engines, prefers pages that have smaller file size. Google itself has not give any suggestion but a page size up to 100KB is considered ideal.

CSS allows greater control on page structure
By using CSS, your web documents can be provided structure as per HTML standards without hampering its look and feel. Designers can develop attractive pages with the use of CSS by following possible standards and guidelines. Though majority of the designers tend to ignore these standards, as they believe the standards lead to develop a plain and simple page irrespective to a page featured with many elements. Google rewards only those pages that are well-structured.

CSS allows you to hide content from browsers while Google still picks them up
With CSS, you can hide some of the content on a specific browser in specific situation. For instance, there are some content that is confined to print and appears only in that form of media, or the other part of content is shown on screen, but does not appear in print. Google has an advantage to index all of those hidden pages and help you avail the benefits your content brings to you.

The CSS you use should be compatible with multiple browsers. Different browsers interpret CSS standards in different ways. Some old browsers do not even read CSS.

This post was written and submitted by one of our contributors, Manish Chauhan. He is eMarketing head of Pixelcrayons, a quality PSD to HTML conversion firm that offers high quality hand coded pixel-precise markup services and implementation into skins, themes, CMS, shopping carts and more.