CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is an external style sheet which gives flexibility to web designers for styling their content within the html documents. CSS is basically used to separate the layout and style code from the main content of the page. In short, CSS is collection of rules which can help you to control appearance of your web page. CSS websites have many benefits over normal html websites, such as consistency in design, faster loading and ease of maintenance. And, if CSS is properly used, it can also benefit the website in on-page SEO(search engine optimization).

The benefit of using CSS is that all the layout and style is removed from the html file, so the size of html file becomes smaller. The Browser downloads the CSS file just once when the visitor visits the site and it is re-used for all other pages on a web site. The reduced file size helps your website to load fast and also be easily crawled by the search engines. Thus, CSS helps to decrease the code-to-content ratio, can make your entire site easier and more efficient to crawl, leading to more and better indexing of your site’s content.

As maintenance of website becomes easy with CSS, you can concentrate on adding fresher SEO content from time to time and make your website rank well in search engine.

Search Engine bots always give priority for content in the website. Search engine bots visit the site for a short duration; they do not like to go through long design codes to find the content for indexing. Tables and font styling tags which are used for designing, makes HTML code little bit difficult to read and reduces the accuracy of indexed content; whereas, with CSS, your HTML code will become cleaner, which improve your search engine rankings.

Also, with the help of CSS, you can move the elements which are important from search engine’s viewpoint to the top of the HTML file. Moving your important content to the top of the html file will help search engines to find your content and index it properly. For example, with little bit of CSS knowledge, you can change the position of your code for menu or header and make it appear below the main content in your website code, thus giving a boost to your search engine ranking.

Looking at all these advantages of CSS for SEO, you can see that use of CSS in website design is definitely useful from SEO point of view.

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