Style Sheets and Search Engines
If you're one of the people who, like me, learned HTML when the current server software was NCSA 1.0, you've probably put off style sheets.
I've been slowly converting my sites to use them, as well as working towards xhtml compliance. I'm converting to style sheets for the sake of the search engines, a prettier look, and ease of site maintenance. I'm trying to make things xhtml compliant to do the right thing. I'd like to say I'm converting to xhtml so that my code displays the same on all browsers but there appears to be at least as much incompatibility in browser interpretation of xhtml code as there was in html.
I've heard it said that search engines expect to find correct code and rank sites higher accordingly, but studies I've seen have not shown this to be true. Proper use of spelling and grammar is important but presently most search engines appear to be relatively insensitive to correct html. I expect it's possible at some point in the future so one should probably work towards making their code as correct as possible now.
Style sheets can help improve search engine ranking by improving keyword density and by making more of your sites text accessible to search engines. How can style sheets, which only serve to specify how your text is displayed, make your sites text more accessible? Many search engines will only read the first X bytes of a document, perhaps the first 64kB, and ignore the rest even if another 14mB follows. The reasoning is that if the keyword doesn't appear near the top of the document, it isn't important enough to be ranked sufficiently high to have any chance at being seen among the higher ranking documents.
If 80% of the first 64kB of your document is tags that could be extracted and placed in a style sheet, things like, and arguments to <table>, <td>, <tr> and <body> tags, then only 20% or 12.8 kBytes of your document will be seen by search engines and those tags will dilute the keyword density giving even that portion that is indexed a lower ranking.
If you haven't yet learned cascading style sheets, I would suggest the CSS tutorial at w3school.
I've been slowly converting my sites to use them, as well as working towards xhtml compliance. I'm converting to style sheets for the sake of the search engines, a prettier look, and ease of site maintenance. I'm trying to make things xhtml compliant to do the right thing. I'd like to say I'm converting to xhtml so that my code displays the same on all browsers but there appears to be at least as much incompatibility in browser interpretation of xhtml code as there was in html.
I've heard it said that search engines expect to find correct code and rank sites higher accordingly, but studies I've seen have not shown this to be true. Proper use of spelling and grammar is important but presently most search engines appear to be relatively insensitive to correct html. I expect it's possible at some point in the future so one should probably work towards making their code as correct as possible now.
Style sheets can help improve search engine ranking by improving keyword density and by making more of your sites text accessible to search engines. How can style sheets, which only serve to specify how your text is displayed, make your sites text more accessible? Many search engines will only read the first X bytes of a document, perhaps the first 64kB, and ignore the rest even if another 14mB follows. The reasoning is that if the keyword doesn't appear near the top of the document, it isn't important enough to be ranked sufficiently high to have any chance at being seen among the higher ranking documents.
If 80% of the first 64kB of your document is tags that could be extracted and placed in a style sheet, things like, and arguments to <table>, <td>, <tr> and <body> tags, then only 20% or 12.8 kBytes of your document will be seen by search engines and those tags will dilute the keyword density giving even that portion that is indexed a lower ranking.
If you haven't yet learned cascading style sheets, I would suggest the CSS tutorial at w3school.
posted by Nanook at 4:20 PM
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