CSS2 and SEO

I just wanted to point out the relationship between CSS2 and SEO. Its based on a discussion that took place at a department team meeting.

Below are examples of how CSS2 will improve search effectiveness (thanks Klaus !..my manager for his expertise and input)

There are several factors that come into play:

1. Structure markup: The CSS templates tend to have more reasonable markup structure and highlight important elements structurally, for example h1 for a heading instead of a nested table of tables, a single anchor element for a link instead of a table with separate elements for the link icon and the actual link.
2. Page weight: CSS based templates have a better content-to-markup ratio, so search engines find relevant content higher up in the document (and generally index the site faster because smaller documents take less time to retrieve and analyze).
3. Content ordering: Content can be ordered in a logical way, with important information first and related links etc. last. Text flows more naturally since fewer tags are required to control presentation, which helps with keyword placement based ranking algorithms.
4. Fewer graphics: Decorative graphical elements such as link icons, backgrounds etc. no longer appear in the HTML code, increasing the percentage of relevant content in the document (see the examples in Will's presentations).

One word of caution: there are blackhat CSS SEO techniques also which we obviously should not use, similar to using invisible text with font tags and link colors CSS allows developers to create invisible elements, and this may be desirable for some elements such as accessibility information which is hidden from a visual browser, but in most cases those techniques are not applicable.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and SEO -- http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/css-and-seo.shtml has a pretty good overview of how CSS helps with SEO.