I think what I learned the most about CSS Design when going to the PubCon conference wasn’t necessarily technical, at least in my mind, as it was logical. It wasn’t what they said but what was triggered in my mind about what they said. CSS just seemed to make much more sense.
First of all, most of the things I heard I knew. I found out a few different tricks to make life easier, but for the most part the puzzle just seemed to come together.
The search engines read the HTML and that is pretty much all that they care about. CSS is more of an element for the browsers to use in interpretting the decoration and layout of the content. HTML was not created for design. In all actuality the search engine could probably care less on how the text is decorated. If you are familiar with keyword prominence, then this can be confusing because we always talk about making things stand out. Well just changing the color and bolding and italicizing is something that should be done in the CSS. Even size change. There are some default elements however that the search engines pay a little more attention to. Those are things like the heading tags, strong tags, link tags, and the basic tags that are set to specify different types of text. Understanding that, those are the elements that are creating the true prominence on search engines.
Heading Tags are things like h1, h2, h3, h4, etc. When the search engines see those tags they expect the text to get bigger and bolder and they expect important information to be in there. So it is very important to use heading tags. Strong tags are the true bold tag. Bold isn’t really the b tag, it should be the strong tag. A lot of the font weight can be determined through CSS, but the strong tag is a default CSS element so it should be used. Of course last and possibly most important would be the link tags, specified by using an ‘a’ in the beginning. This definately creates some notice in the coding.
By limiting your use of decoration and sticking to the CSS defined styles your HTML code will become more streamlined. The more code the search engine has to sort thru the harder it becomes to determine what the real content is. Also lets just say that if you were rated on density not necessarily thru just your content but within your code, when you use CSS it will get rid of a lot of unnecessary code that will make you more able to get your density within the code a lot higher.
When using CSS alway opt to refer to your style sheet externally rather than mucking up the top of your HTML code.
Remember also that Search Engines cannot read Javascript, Frames, and Flash very easily. Often times it is well worth the option to completely rid your design of any of the mentioned to help your content become more streamlined for the search engines.
Worst thing ever to do with your site, create a Flash landing page. Do not in any circumstance create a Flash landing page unless you are willing and able to spend a lot of money to market your website.
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