Css

[ZingZangs]

I have been reading alot about CSS of late, and how it apparently boosts SEO and traffic to a site can be increased dramatically.

Can anyone shed any light on this, please.

[lamery]

Css in and of itself does not boost SEO ranking nor will it increase traffic to your website.

The job of search engines is to provide relevant results for a given search. The better they are at doing this the more likely people will continue to use them (generally they want more usage so they can sell more adverts!).

If search engines favoured sites based on the technology or method used to implement them they would not necessarily be achieving goal number one of a search engine (I might know nothing of CSS but everything about left handed spatulas, if I built a website about left handed spatulas and was the definitive source online for left handed spatulas I had better be at the top of the search engines indepedent of the fact I wrote all my content in word and saved as html or not!).

So how did Css achieve the claim of this mystical boosting power? Css encourages better designed websites if done properly. If sites are built using semantically focused HTML tags then styled with Css as a secondary effort - the website is focused on content first and foremost. Not only that, but the content is easily discoverable by the search engines and it is clear what is a title, what is a heading, what is a paragraph (no content mixed up in "tag soup"). It turns out these are the elements required for ensuring your content is indexed most efficiently (none of your content will be lost in the formatting noise).

However, it is still quite easy to use Css and end up with tag soup! Not only that, but it is possible to rank quite well without "Css'ifying" (I'm sure you have done search engine queries that have returned sites with less than pure HTML in the past!).

SEO starts very simply - make sure the keywords people are using on the Internet surrounding your product or service are in your web pages! Start focusing on inbound links, they still count for a lot in a competitive space!

Intermediate - review your content - if you don't have enough start copy writing! Keep thinking about inbound links, they really do count for a lot!

Complex - DNS record ages, url canonicalisation, keyword densities, page counts and keyword and key phrase distributions through those pages.

As with everything Direct Marketing - test and measure!