CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets, as I’m sure you know. And SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. You know that too. Otherwise you wouldn’t have read this far into a page about CSS and SEO. CSS makes life easier for those of us who write or maintain web pages. But the people that pay for sites to be built and maintained don’t so much care if it’s easy for us. They want results. They want high ranking in the search engines, and lots of traffic. They want to make money. So fortunately, CSS is as effective in SEO as it is convenient to implement.

The use of Cascading Style Sheets promotes accessibility, speeds page loading, and helps with cross-browser compatibility. All this is good for traffic as well. That’s important, though it isn’t exactly SEO. Using CSS keeps the code light and the focus on your page content. And that is exactly SEO. Imagine an ordinary web user viewing the code of some old-school web page written all in HTML and trying to read it. They’d surely give up before they got to the first H1. If they did persevere long enough to get to the content, they’d surely not give the site much of a rating for informative or entertaining content.

That is what CSS does to enhance Search Engine Optimization. CSS keeps the code and the content as separate from each other as possible. Just as the imaginary web user above, trying to find content about their favorite movie star in a jumble of code, the search engine bot likes to find what it wants easily. CSS keeps the content prominent, and the code in the background. The search engine spider says to itself, in spider-speak:

“What must I look for? Content, relevant to the search terms of the Humans, that is what I must look for. Headings, relative to that content, those also I shall seek. And links, valid and relevant, those shall I also record and remember. Here now, is content, with headings not encumbered with font declarations, and links organized in a way that I recognize, being in common list structures. I see this content clearly and find it good. This page will I recommend highly when the Humans do enter their search terms.”

That spider is also suspicious of broken code, open tags, and other human errors. CSS keeps the requirement for code on the page simple, really allowing HTML to be used as the tool for “marking up” text that it was designed to be.

If you are a writer of pages, you will love using CSS for speed and convenience. If you pay the bills for website design, and maybe do the statistics tracking as well, you might not know it, but you love CSS for Search Engine Optimization as well. You might not ever read the code, but you’ll read the traffic report, and smile. CSS for SEO makes both the coders and the customers happy.