The Power of CSS
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CSS or cascading style sheets are used to create a set of styles that can be applied to your fonts, tables and most other attributes of your web page. These styles allow you to create a much cleaner, faster web page that search engines love and also makes life much easier on the designer when global changes to these styles need to be applied. It is also always critical to always keep in mind your target audience and the average Internet connection speed these users have. By using styles sheets to their full advantage, you can help keep your web page size down to a minimum.
When you sit down to think about the sitemap and the navigational structure of your website, you should consider using cascading style sheets wherever possible. This includes everything from your text attributes to your table padding. Each page you create should be tailored around one or two keyword phrases in order to maximize the relevancy of the content being displayed to the various Internet browsers surfing your website. Using this technique allows you to have a web page which, in the search engines spiders view, only contains html and keyword rich text.
Let's use an example to illustrate the power and capability of cascading style sheets.
Graphic Buttons with Rollover
In the past we created rollover buttons using graphics programs like Adobe Photoshop and/or Macromedia Fireworks, and embedded them on our web page with all the unfriendly code that is needed for the rollover effect. The problem with doing this can be two-fold. First, search engines prefer text links because text is always optimal and you can also put your desired keywords in the text of the link, which can help boost your rankings. Images are also seen as inferior to html, since search engine spiders are not able to scan images as effectively as plain text. When you create navigation with graphical buttons, you lose out on both of these benefits and risk having some of your web pages not indexed by the search engine spiders. This is why well-optimized web pages have text links at the bottom of the page; text makes it easier for search engines to spider your site and compensate for the primary navigation menu.
CSS allows you to create these buttons without having any images visible on your html code (which is where search engines spider). Furthermore, you can embed your desired keyword phrase(s) as the text for your links. Try these steps and you will see how easy it is to simulate the rollover button effect, how much more effective your web site will be for the desired targeted keywords and how much faster your web page will be to load.
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