Author: Maneet Puri

CSS is the word to go by in today's age in the world of website designing. It not only defines the presentation of documents but also styles the web pages so that it. CSS can be applied to website designing process to maximize the efficiency and effectiveness. By incorporating CSS into the website design will make the website perform better in the search engines game in addition to scoring well on accessibility, usability and prettiness quotient.

Let us first understand what CSS exactly is. CSS or Cascading Style Sheets is a stylesheet language that is used to describe the presentation of documents written in any markup language. It actually separates the presentation code from the actual content of the website design. For web pages written in HTML or XHTML, it's the best and what's better is that it can be applied to just any kind of XML document be it SVG or XUL.

A set of CSS style rules are built up and stored in a file with .css extension. This file is then linked from the web pages using a HTML link tag.

There are several benefits you stand to gain. Here are 3 possible ways to go about it.

Use CSS to Structure Your Document

Every website aims to make it to the top of search engines. Likewise the search engines send their robots to various websites to get fresh and relevant content. Websites vie for the same thing and that is website popularity.

Let's consider the facts that we know about search engines. They send their search engine robots to your site to read the content that you have there and the easier it is to find for them the better because they don't waste much time looking. So having said this, what is the point of bogging down your pages with lots of un-necessary presentation markup that could quite easily be stored off in a separate CSS file.

Most often this means removed any extraneous table tags and replacing them with a smaller number of HTML div tags which can be formatted using CSS rules. This removes the vast majority of presentational markup and leaves you with nicely formatted content that the search engines can easily find and index.

Web Design Technique 2 - Us CSS to Style Your Header Tags

We also know that search engines place a huge amount of importance on the header tags - h1,h2,h3 e.t.c. that they find in your pages. The thing that puts most inexperienced web designers off using header tags is that by default modern browsers render them in massive black text that looks really ugly.

This is where CSS comes in. CSS can be used to easily make your header tags appear in nicely formatted, attractive text that both scores well with search engines and is pleasing to the eye of the user - perfect!

Web Design Technique 3 - Us CSS to Create Rollover Images

Traditionally rollover images are created using 2 graphics for the on and off states that are toggled on and off using some complex JavaScript code. This JavaScript code can bloat your web pages and since it is not content and just appears as gibberish to search engines it can adversely affect your rankings to have lots of embedded JavaScript in your web pages.

A much better way to accomplish the same web design effect is to use CSS. Your still need your 2 graphics but you actually create a normal text link in your (that can also have keyword targeted anchor text) and use CSS to format its appearance. This is as simple as making the link a block level element in your HTML, setting it a height and width and then defining it 2 different background images, 1 for when the link is in its 'off state' and when for when the user is hovering over the link.

Conclusion

Cascading style sheets are a very powerful way of separating presentation code from your actual content and the search engine optimisation benefits the CSS will bring to your web design are undeniable. Why not put these CSS web design techniques to work on your website today?

About the Author:
Maneet Puri is the managing director of LeXolution IT Services is a premier web development company that provides seamless and efficient web development servicesto its clients along with a range of other Internet promotion services. Having been in the industry for more than 10 years, he is an expert in his field and this shows in the deliverables. "