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I am sure this topic seems a bit strange, you are thinking how can using Cascading Style Sheets help me with my SEO efforts? Well, there are a few reasons and advantages which we will look at.
CSS is all about styling or appearance of a website and seperating the style or appearance of a website from the content. In order to understand why it is to your advantage then we need to take a little bit of a look at how we can apply style or presentation to an html document.
The example webpage we have been using is pretty ugly, and there are a lot of things we could do to "pretty it up". We could use tags such as <font> to change the font characterstics including size and colour. We could even use the <center> tags to enclose any text we wanted to appear in the middle of the page. When the web was very new the web browsers needed this information in order to display the information in a page. The browsers have evolved, but not all Webmasters have - some are still stuck in 1997.
We could acheive the same results of these tags by applying inline style information to any of the tags that are in the page. Inline style is achevied by applying the style="style-info:param;" attribute to any html tag. The last on-page method is to place CSS information within the header. This is referred to as an Internal Style Sheet and contains exactly the same format as an external CSS.
That only leaves 2 possible choices for the style information. The web browser defaults - which would mean EVERY web page would look the same or a Cascading Style Sheet. A CSS is a totally seperate document that is referenced within the header of a web page.
Another often mis-used html tag is the table tag to place information in specific places within your page. Tables were once required, but now, should only ever be used to present tabular data such as listing prices and sizes in your e-commerce site.
Ok, now we know a little bit about how we could change and affect the presentation, we can look at the advantages/disadvantages of each method.
To answer the question let me pose another question for consideration. Does adding a lot of extra tags or Markup to the document add any content to the document? I hope your answer was no!
We all want our websites to look a particular way, present information in a way that is friendly to our visitors. To this end we understand that some effort is required to present our website. The most efficient is by using A CSS to apply style to various html elements. By using an external CSS we are minimising the amount of markup required within your web page to acheive the desired look. Now, the advantage here is when the SE spiders your web page, and finds only a small amount of html to deal with it can concentrate on indexing content. SE's don't index the html - they are interested in the content.
CSS is a way of keeping all the unnecessary html out of our pages, most of the time making them smaller.
Tables were once the only way to present information in a non-linear fashion. With the addition of the <div> tag and CSS tables should have almost become obsolete. Sadly that is not the case and a lot of webmasters still insist on using tables when they are not required or necessary.
When creating a complex table with a lot of columns and a lot of rows it takes quite a lot of html. If you nest tables one inside another, the html can be even more complex. With all these tags doiong nothing but describing the text, rather than adding to the content, it only takes 1 mistake to mess it all up.
When a Search Engine spiders a table, it may not "read" the information how a site visitor reads it. In terms of SEO, this is not good as important information may not be given the weighing as you expected it to be.
The main advantage is of course when you use CSS you can change the look of your entire website by changing just one CSS file. The advantages are clear when it comes to your time and effort when you want to update or modify your website. You can just imagine the time and effort if you had to update every single page on your site!
We have not really said much about why CSS helps SEO. You have seen how by using CSS your web pages can be much smaller and contain a smaller amount of html. The SEO advantage is that it is suspected that the markup to content ratio is used by some SE's in calculating word density. If this is the case, then by removing all the unnecessary words (html) from your document then the ratio and relevance of you actual content improves.
Search Engine Spiders may or may not be as sophisticated as your web browser. By keeping the html as small as possible, you are not putting the markup in the way of the content. Making use of CSS will help you acheive a smaller web page.