Cascading Style Sheets, a tool that enables web designers to add a multitude of styles to HTML documents makes it easier for businesses to manage the appearance of their website landing pages. Besides making your web pages look more presentable, CSS enables these landing pages to load faster with hardly any buffering.
Businesses seeking to make their websites SEO-friendly are able to do so with CSS. Search engines generally display essential content at the top of the search results page, however, this isn’t the case with standard HTML codes.
When it comes to HTML codes, search engines go through these codes, which are not displayed to the general public. Keeping this in mind, let’s shed some light on a few ways businesses can employ CSS to enhance SEO.
8 Ways Businesses Can Leverage CSS For SEO in 2023
Make updates simple
CSS makes it easier to access your content. Moreover, it leads to newer web pages updated frequently, due to which your website remains updated with the latest content at all times. Search engines appreciate such websites that regularly update their content. Did you know that 95.2% of websites use External CSS?
This is because External CSS helps in saving time when small updates like changes in the font are to be made. With HTML, you will need to make these changes for every page. However, with CSS, you will only have to make this change once.
Organize website content
As outlined earlier, search engines scan a website’s page based on its HTML code. In this case, the visual appearance does not have much to do with SEO. This also implies that search engines like Google might not see your page as per your expectations.
Google browsed through the content of a website’s page from the top left to the bottom right. This means that if your page has, say, a navigation bar or a sidebar before the actual content, it will read these sections first. Which, in turn, will lower your rankings on the search results page.
To avoid such situations, businesses can use CSS to organize their HTML code accordingly. You can use CSS to place your SEO-optimized content on the top and less important sections below.
Use browser cache effectively
88.5% of websites use Inline CSS to design page elements like fonts, colors, images, and more. Your browser cache stores everything when you run the style sheet of your page for the first time after all these elements are created. This leads to quick loading of the subsequent pages because the browser does not have to render new styles sheets every time.
The browser has to retrieve, analyze, and render each page in standard HTML code. This increases the server load and leads to poor performance. CSS can resolve this issue instantly.
Emphasize on keywords
Keywords are crucial for a webpage to rank higher on Google and other search engines. These keywords are generally phrases or words that users input in the ‘Search’ bar. By incorporating such keywords or keyphrases, Google will rank your content higher and make sure the users view it since it matches with what they’re looking for.
Therefore, businesses emphasize keywords more compared to other content. Numerous websites prefer to make these keywords bold in order to highlight them separately. Similar tactics are done to ensure the content is SEO-friendly. The best part about CSS is that businesses are able to hide these keywords without having to stuff them.
This way, search engines can locate these tags but the readers can’t thus make your content reader-friendly and SEO-friendly at the same time. Without using the right keywords, regardless of how good your content is, it will not rank on the first page of Google or even on the top two to three pages. Therefore, keyword emphasis and on-page SEO are crucial for websites.
Decreasing the code-to-content ratio.
With CSS, you can make the page lighter in weight and improve SEO for your client by reducing the code-to-content ratio. An ideal code-to-content ratio has more content compared to the codes. By doing so, the website’s loading speed decreases, enabling the website to run faster without having users wait for several minutes to go through the content.
This in return, will reduce the bounce rate of a website as well. Just like CSS, Paul Martel, a router table aficionado suggests that businesses have started to use it because of the stability and efficiency factors it offers.
Using standard HTML tags
Businesses can use standard HTML tags like heading tags H1, H2, H3, and more. By incorporating these tags, Google recognizes these headings and subheadings instantly and prioritizes your content accordingly. Therefore, it’s best to make use of a few standard HTML tags instead of <font> tags, which are not given much preference.
Tags such as the unordered list tag <ul> or hyperlink tag <a> are used to link important areas of content. Search engines can easily discover these links, and thus, enhance the visibility of your website.
Bottom Line
Using CSS for SEO is highly beneficial for businesses since it makes it easier to organize content so that websites can push their ranks higher on Google and other search engines. CSS enables businesses to make necessary changes in the HTML codes once without having to constantly do this for every website page individual.
Once you know how to use CSS for SEO, ranking higher on search engines would no longer seem to be a difficult task. Besides the ways discussed above, there is a multitude of other ways as well for businesses to leverage the power of CSS.