In the cut-throat competition for first page search engine rankings, having a competitive edge is more important than ever. Most companies with a website understand the importance of online marketing, but too few of them know how to tell whether their website itself is efficient. Efficiency makes a difference in many ways, including faster load time and faster indexing time by search engines. There is no way of being more efficient than by creating a table-less, CSS based website. It is the perfect platform on which to build your organic search engine optimization campaign.
CSS (cascading style sheets) is the term referring to a file type and coding style. It’s a way of programming that allows you to add all of the styles of your website, including fonts, colors, backgrounds, and even layout on a separate .css file. This leaves your html document clean of style code that slows down your website, and only leaves your content for search engines to see.
Faster Search Engine Indexing with CSS Website Design
When someone performs an online search, the search engine looks through its internal index, not the Internet. This is done for speed and performance; it’s the only way of getting immediate search results. Different websites get indexed at different intervals. News sites, for example, may get indexed daily–even hourly–while small company sites may get indexed every 2-4 weeks. If you are in this majority, you can understand the importance of getting indexed quickly. Missing out on being properly indexed can mean weeks of search engine invisibility. It is important to cater to these search engines in order to be found. Providing them the most useful information as quickly as possible, in the most organized way possible, will ultimately benefit your website SEO and will help improve your rankings. Consider CSS as one of your first steps in improving your search engine optimization efforts.
When your site is being indexed by search engines, they deploy bits of code referred to as “bots” or “crawlers” that scan your website code and rank your site according to the website’s content. These bits of code will scan your website code from the top down, ultimately reaching the content and links, which allow it to also index other pages within your site. It is within every website owner’s interest to allow these bots or crawlers to find this information as fast as possible. Depending on the complexity of your website, removing all the styles from your html document can often reduce the amount of code by more than half. This means that a search engine bot will only have to do half the work on each page, reaching the important content faster and increasing the chances that each page within your site will be fully crawled and indexed.
Bots and crawlers will not always scan an entire website. If your site is too heavy in code, the bot may only scan half of your page before leaving and reporting back to the search engine index about your site content. If your important content is low on your site, the likelihood of it being indexed drops significantly. This problem can be solved with CSS.
Two Different Presentations of Your Site
There exists two different presentations of your website. The website design that the human visitor sees and the website presentation that the bots see. CSS layout allows you to place the important content at the top of the code, regardless of where it appears on the viewable page. This ensures that the important content is a priority where it counts, in your search engine rankings. Additionally, your visitor will enjoy a faster load time, reducing your website bounce rate and helping your visitors stay as long as possible.
Cross Browser Integration
Creating a CSS based website will not only help your loading and index time, but will also help with your user experience. CSS is fully integrated by most search browsers such as Firefox, Safari, Chrome and the most recent versions of Explorer. CSS is also capable of rendering websites equally throughout each one of these browsers in most instances, reducing debugging time. This means you can avoid cross-browser glitches and special coding “hacks” to make a website look and work the same across multiple browsers.
If you own a website, find out whether you can benefit from CSS. Contact Incitrio Branding & Marketing Agency at 858.202.1822 for a free website analysis. We are a San Diego marketing agency focused on short and long term client success through integrated marketing, website design, advertising, email marketing, search engine optimization, social media, and CSS programming. Visit our testimonials page to take a look at what some of our happy clients are saying about us.
