Effective Search Engine Optimization with CSS

The use of CSS when building a web site can help your search engine position. CSS can help you clean up your source code making your files easily readable by the search engine spiders and lowering the file size. This reduction in file size means the ratio of text to code content is higher giving favorable results.

Main Headings

The use of heading tags can give a real boost to search engine promotion. Customizing your headers with CSS is very easy. Header tags can have multiple uses.

Current search engine algorithms use ranking formulas that give more weight to keywords that you include in header text. Search engines assume that if header tags contain important information, the keywords inside header tags must be equally important.

Header tags define what information is the most important or most deserving of attention by search engine spiders.

h1 tags are more important than h2 tags. h3 tags are subsections of h2 tags, and so on. h1 defines the largest header, h6 defines the smallest header..

<h1>Heading Size 1</h1>

<h2>Heading Size 2</h2>

<h3>Heading Size 3</h3>

<h4>Heading Size 4</h4>

<h5>Heading Size 5</h5>

<h6>Heading Size 6</h6>

Use heading tags only for headings. Don’t use them just to make something bold we can use other tags for that.

How to write a heading tag

The CSS markup I use to write headings for this page is as follows:

h1
{
font-size: 220%;
}
h2
{
font-size: 190%;
}
h3
{
font-size: 160%;
}
h4
{
font-size: 130%;
}
h5
{
font-size: 100%;
}
h6
{
font-size: 70%;
}

As you can see I used 220% font size for the main h1 tag. This is the most important tag and should be placed as close as possible to the <body> tag in your html document. The rest of the h tags decrease in font size until I reach 70% for my h6 tag.

The markup in my html document for h1 tag is as follows:

<h1>CSS Help - Search engine optimisation with CSS </h1>

This tag is the main heading for my page and after my <title> this is the second most important text the search engine spiders will read.

Final note

There are many ways to improve your search engine ranking with carefully constructed CSS. I hope to add more examples as I work through them. Please feel free to email me your thoughts or ideas.